[shaklee3]

Maybe, maybe not. They have the advantage that they make the hardware, so they're not paying as much retail as nvidia is charging them for their cards. I don't think there's any way you can say the TPU is cheaper compared to buying your own system. If Google decides to release it to the public, that's a different story. Also, keep in mind that Google allows you to mix and match the CPU core count to GPU, whereas AWS doesn't. It's possible that the Google cloud price with fewer CPU cores will be much cheaper than the AWS instance.

[jacksmith21006]

That is true. But the cost of running is where all the cost is at really not so much in making the chips.

Yes I can say it is a lot cheaper. That is what this article is all about.

You can do about twice the images per dollar using the TPUs with GCP versus using Nvidia with AWS.

Or what am I missing?

BTW, Google has released to the general public. What are you talking about?

"Google’s AI chips are now open for public use"

https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/12/googles-ai-chips-are-now-...

[shaklee3]

You misunderstood. They released them to the public on GCP only. Nvidia's cards are released to the public as a hardware device that you can customize around. Big difference.

[jacksmith21006]

Yes in the cloud as you would expect in 2018. Available to the general public.

[shaklee3]

They announced in 2016 they had TPUs. So no, I would not expect that 2 full years later they're just now being available in the public cloud. These are not new products to them; they likely just don't want to deal with supporting them in different configurations.

[ndesaulniers]

> they likely just don't want to deal with supporting them in different configurations.

It is a lot of work. But mainly that TPUv1 only did inference while TPUv2 does training+inference.

[shaklee3]

Exactly my point. It's a lot of work. That's the reason why Nvidia has such a large team doing it, and also why they spent 3 billion dollars to build the V100 ASIC.