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> google's chips are advanced matrix multiplying engines Excuse my ignorance, but aren't GPUs exactly that?
by copperx 9y ago
> google's chips are advanced matrix multiplying engines
Excuse my ignorance, but aren't GPUs exactly that?
- rileyphone 9y agoFrom what I can tell, Google's TPUs are boiling GPUs down to the essence of what they do in TensorFlow, namely a "higher volume of reduced precision computation" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit
- hedgehog 9y agoGPUs are generally much more flexible and can run something resembling a normal C program. From the little public information available chips like Google TPU or NVIDIA's Tensor Core (a functional unit on the Volta architecture) are essentially hard-wired to do exactly low precision matrix multiplication. Less flexible but more efficient when you know that's what your workload is. https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/inside-volta/ https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/inside-volta/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/05/first-depth-look-googles-tpu-architecture/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/05/first-depth-look-goo...
- dnautics 9y agono, GPUs are vector math engines. To be fair, you can assemble a matrix multiply from vector math, but it is not quite the same. In spirit, GPUs are closer to matrix engines than neuromorphic chips.