That wasn't really my point - I'm simply noting that Urs is one of the last people I'd think to hop on the wimpy crazy train. His published articles suggest th

That wasn't really my point - I'm simply noting that Urs is one of the last people I'd think to hop on the wimpy crazy train. His published articles suggest that he's got a very good grasp of the tradeoffs involved in "real" TCO -- i.e., taking a fairly global view of both the human, capital, and operating expenses involved in a technology decision such as using wimpies (no) or fabricating a custom ASIC for machine learning (yes). That doesn't mean a TPU is faster or slower than anything in particular, it just means that quite likely that it's good for some machine learning tasks that Google cares enough about to spend the whatever dollars it cost to make the thing. The WSJ article has a few more quotes from Norm Jouppi, btw.: http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-isnt-playing-games-with-new-chip-1463597820 http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-isnt-playing-games-with-n... (Sorry if that gets paywalled. Googling "wall street journal google tensor processing unit" got me there.)