[zifpanachr23]

Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing.

They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs.

This implies that the 9,216 chip configuration doesn't actually exist in any form in reality, or else it would now be the world's largest supercomputer (by flops) by a huge margin.

Am I massively misunderstanding what the claims being made are about the TPU and the 42.6 exaFLOPs? I feel like this would be much bigger news if this was fully legit.

Edit: The flops being benchmarked are not the same as regular supercomputer flops.

[phonon]

Supercomputers are measured based on 64 bit floating point operations. Here they (inaptly) compared it to their 8 bit floating point operations (which are only useful for AI workloads).

[zifpanachr23]

Gotcha. That makes a lot more sense. I was led to believe by the wording of the comparison that they were the same operations. Appreciate the explanation.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Why is it inapt?

If all you care about is an 8-bit AI workload (there's definitely a market for that), it's nice to have 24x the speed.

[remus]

It's an apples to oranges comparison.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's apples to apples if you care about 8-bit (a lot of people do these days).

AFAIK, there wasn't a faster 8-bit super computer to compare to - which is why they made the comparison.

[p_l]

Also the set of supported/accelerated operations in the fastest path is different no matter whether you use 8, 16, or 32bit floats, thus the common use of "TOPS" as benchmark number recently.