5 ms·

TPUv1 were made to have good performance per watt for inference. [1] TPUv2 were benchmarked against NVIDIa's K80 at 30 times the performance and had a peak of

TPUv1 were made to have good performance per watt for inference. [1] TPUv2 were benchmarked against NVIDIa's K80 at 30 times the performance and had a peak of 92 TOPS [2] while the 2080 TI is at 440 TOPS [3] [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/11749/hot-chips-google-tpu-performance-analysis-live-blog-3pm-pt-10pm-utc https://www.anandtech.com/show/11749/hot-chips-google-tpu-pe... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tpu-v2-google-machine-learning,35370.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tpu-v2-google-machine-lear... [3] https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-articles/comparison-of-nvidia-geforce-gpus-and-nvidia-tesla-gpus/ https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-articles/compariso...

shaklee3 8y ago
Why would anyone compare a modern tpu against an Nvidia card that is four generations old? The tpu didn't even exist when the K80 came out.
- deepnotderp 8y ago
  Marketing. nVidia is destroying the TPUs right now and Google is desperate to keep their perception in the public eye as the king of AI (which tbf, they probably are, compute capabilities aside)
  - matt4077 8y ago
    You should try the assumption of good faith some time. It generally leads to a happier place. In this case the data was from the time Google introduced the TPU internally, when the K80 was very much up-to-date. It also makes sense because the K80 was the only GPU offered in GCP.
    - shaklee3 8y ago
      This is the tpu v2, and it was most certainly not released internally when the K80 was.
    - deepnotderp 8y ago
      You're talking about the tpu v1, not v2 or v3, so no. Also, there's no need for assumptions when you know what's going on in the design team.
xbmcuser 8y ago
Google usually talks about it's hardware few months after they have moved to a newer better version. They probably are already using TPUv4 by now.
- dgacmu 8y ago
  TPUv1 was never exposed externally as a thing you could rent in cloud, but with that exception, Google's been pretty consistently trying to offer the best available option to cloud customers. (disclaimer: while I'm part-time at Google, this is my personal impression, not an official statement, etc., etc.)
  - xbmcuser 8y ago
    They probably feel TPUv3 is stable enough to give access to cloud customers now. But I doubt they do not already have TPUv4 versions running already internally in some capacity maybe only for testing.
    - emu 8y ago
      Since you mention it: Cloud TPUv3 is now available in beta (brand new!) See: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ (420 TFlop/s, 128GB HBM)

shaklee3 8y ago

Why would anyone compare a modern tpu against an Nvidia card that is four generations old? The tpu didn't even exist when the K80 came out.

deepnotderp 8y ago
Marketing. nVidia is destroying the TPUs right now and Google is desperate to keep their perception in the public eye as the king of AI (which tbf, they probably are, compute capabilities aside)
- matt4077 8y ago
  You should try the assumption of good faith some time. It generally leads to a happier place. In this case the data was from the time Google introduced the TPU internally, when the K80 was very much up-to-date. It also makes sense because the K80 was the only GPU offered in GCP.
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    This is the tpu v2, and it was most certainly not released internally when the K80 was.
  - deepnotderp 8y ago
    You're talking about the tpu v1, not v2 or v3, so no. Also, there's no need for assumptions when you know what's going on in the design team.

xbmcuser 8y ago

Google usually talks about it's hardware few months after they have moved to a newer better version. They probably are already using TPUv4 by now.

dgacmu 8y ago
TPUv1 was never exposed externally as a thing you could rent in cloud, but with that exception, Google's been pretty consistently trying to offer the best available option to cloud customers. (disclaimer: while I'm part-time at Google, this is my personal impression, not an official statement, etc., etc.)
- xbmcuser 8y ago
  They probably feel TPUv3 is stable enough to give access to cloud customers now. But I doubt they do not already have TPUv4 versions running already internally in some capacity maybe only for testing.
  - emu 8y ago
    Since you mention it: Cloud TPUv3 is now available in beta (brand new!) See: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ (420 TFlop/s, 128GB HBM)