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Why not use Google's platform, which runs on their new custom chips (Tensor Processing Unit)?
by imaginenore 10y ago
Why not use Google's platform, which runs on their new custom chips (Tensor Processing Unit)?
- vonnik 10y agoWhy use it, if it locks you in?
- xadhominemx 10y agoIf you're a hobbyist, why would you care about lock in?
- flamedoge 10y agoBecause you don't have control over what Google does. They may kill TPU altogether leaving your work irrelevant.
- hyperbovine 10y agoHobbies come, hobbies go.
- willvarfar 10y agoYou don't have control over what nvidia, intel or the rest of them either. If you want to get your 'feet wet', then why bother?
- flamedoge 10y agoBecause they have client facing products and backward compatibility is important to clients.
- lmm 10y agoI care about being able to carry on doing my hobby stuff 5 or 10 years from now. With NVidia I can at least be confident that as long as my graphics card keeps working (which feels like something under my control, unlike Google shutting down their products) I can keep running my code on it.
- visarga 10y agoBecause it's not made to accelerate training, just inference. The TPU is an 8-bit fixed point processor less power hungry than GPUs, so it won't help research, only deployment for large projects, running in the cloud.