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Google's Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore's Law 7 Years Into The Future (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. "TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company's I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. "We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law)," said Google's blog post. "TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly." The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license.
Specialized processing chips have been several 'generations' ahead in terms of processing per dollar for many decades. In the 90's at least, DSPs were doing audio/video processing much cheaper by performing many machine-level steps simultaneously in one 'cycle' with less power than a general processor, by leaving out the features and cost of a general processor. And all you had to do to use them was test them on a hardware emulator, flash them, then pop them into production test run until you were good enough to deploy. Depending on the chip, they could run on a trickle of power, without active cooling, and match a much most costly general chip for pennies.
I mean, it's how we got cell phones, and LOTS of other things, including most things in a computer that aren't the CPU.
But isn't Moore's law more about transistors per unit cost, rather than performance per cost? Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding in the headline... which seems about as common as specialized chips in modern technology.
Ryan Fenton
Was that not something introduces about 20 years ago by Silicon Graphics? Or am I getting old
http://manx.classiccmp.org/mir...