5 ms·
why did they never sell their tensor chips as stand-alone components in competition to NVIDIA?
by singularity2001 3y ago
why did they never sell their tensor chips as stand-alone components in competition to NVIDIA?
- Zetobal 3y agonobody would buy them without google substituting it. the chips are just not competetive.
- singularity2001 3y agomaybe the economics of scale would have kicked in after some substitution?
- lvh 3y agoThey sold (and continue to sell) TPUs under the Coral brand, and they're pretty popular for edge inference (e.g. Frigate).
- singularity2001 3y agohttps://www.amazon.com/s?k=Coral+tpu https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Coral+tpu interesting, these are raspberry toy processors, maybe they should have released 'real' ones.
- lvh 3y agoThey may often be used with small embedded computers, but 1 Coral TPU handily beats even a top-end CPU for the stuff Frigate needs it to do -- and it does it at minuscule power draw. Sure, it's inference-focused, and that means it has limitations: it sucks for e.g. speech models, too. But it's pretty great at what it does and gets used in real applications too. My guess is you saw the USB-C model, but they do M2, big cards with multiple M2 slots, and miniPCIe (popular in industrial applications) too.
- mikecoles 3y ago'Toys' that work for the intended function makes them tools. Why blow money on hardware and power when a Coral will do the job well?