The lack of real 8-bit comparison data makes the whole paper a little suspect IMO...it's sort of like the early GPU papers that claimed 100x improvement over th

The lack of real 8-bit comparison data makes the whole paper a little suspect IMO...it's sort of like the early GPU papers that claimed 100x improvement over the CPU while running x87 scalar CPU instructions...the benefits are definitely still there but handicapping one architecture when it has features that are specifically capable of doing this is a bit stupid. It's not like they didn't have to do a lot of work on TF to make it output TPU instructions. When you're down to a 4x improvement...the benefits of specialized accelerators start to become somewhat questionable. I do like that they highlighted the importance of low latency output though...that's even more critical for future non "Web" applications which have to run in real time.