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by jacksmith21006 2977 days ago
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-...
1 comments
shaklee3 2977 days ago
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.
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jacksmith21006 2977 days ago
Yes in the cloud as you would expect in 2018. Available to the general public.
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shaklee3 2977 days ago
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.
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ndesaulniers 2976 days ago
> 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.

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shaklee3 2976 days ago
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.
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jacksmith21006 2976 days ago
Big difference is Google does the entire stack and also has scale to conceptually be able to create a better solution. But that is theoretical.

Here we can see the results where the Google TPU gets almost twice result per dollar over Nvidia. But then Google should be able to iterate more quickly.

Take the move from using CNN to using capsule networks. The idea for Capsules came from Hinton and Google is going to be there first to optimize in hardware. This is the benefit of playing in all layers of the stack.

Or the using NN for text to speech and offering at scale. Google just has inherent advantages over Nvidia and now we get to see a little more concrete results. But hope we get a lot more similar and see if the Google advantage holds up.

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