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What is the hardest thing to accomplish with something like a TPU? Is it the IP or the fabrication? How does the TPU design offer improved performance? By lev
by olfactory 9y ago
What is the hardest thing to accomplish with something like a TPU? Is it the IP or the fabrication?
How does the TPU design offer improved performance? By leveraging IP or fabrication improvements?
- deepnotderp 9y agoNeither, it's a matrix multiply systolic array ASIC, that's been done decades ago. There are host of Chinese companies developing similar processors.
- olfactory 9y agoWhy is Google investing in its own?
- deepnotderp 9y agoCost advantage.
- ucaetano 9y agoScale. Even if you design the fastest chip, you need to convince people to use your proprietary solution that has 0 users currently. Until then you don't have enough volume and scale. Becomes a chicken-and-egg problem. Google was able to solve it by designing TPUs for internal usage first, therefore reaching minimum scale, and then making changes and offering it publicly. So you'd need to be: 1) Chip designer 2) Massive internal user 3) Cloud service provider I don't see any other company that has all 3. Amazon has (3), and maybe (1) if they hired the right people. Microsoft could have enough (2) to justify it, but they're going the way of FPGAs.