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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.
Except it's normally done on the algorithm level, not the chip level.
How many working, deployed hardware implementations have there been?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Moore's law relates to the number of components in an integrated circuit.
I really doubt these things put more transistors onto a piece of silicon.
It's because today was Google I/O, Google's developer conference, so a lot of projects were announced. Still, Slashdot could have combined all these into story with links to details rather than spam us with a ton of Google stories. However, this TPU project might be the most interesting thing to come out of the conference. Not because the chips are novel (it's just the same principles as GPUs but taken to a further extreme), but because it sounds like Google's getting into low level chip manufacture. We'll have to wait and see if Google can deliver more FLOPS per dollar/watt than the leading co-processor manufacturer, NVIDIA.
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
It's easy to disparage the efforts of somebody trying big things when they don't go as planned isn't it. But they are trying and the next step they take could be that 'big thing'. What have you done lately?
I will trust Intel, AMD and NVidia to sustain Moore's law as it pertains to general purpose computing, not Google. Google gets plaudits for advancing neural net hardware, if indeed they didn't just buy the tech and slap the Google brand on it, which is likely. Thw hyperbole just erodes credibility, in other words, makes me wonder how many other exaggerations will turn up in this department. Yes, it's a fact it plays Go well, and no doubt does a lot of other things well. Let's stick to the facts please. It didn't advance rendering by 7 years, it didn't advance compiling, in fact it didn't advance just about anything I do with my own computer. Putting my own jaded spin on it, it mainly advances Google's ability to invade my privacy and monetize me.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
End of message.
This is the FIFTH Google story today.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Tensor Processing Units are not new. SGI used to offer that for their Octane, aimed pretty heavily at the satellite image analysis crowd.
What's amazing (or maybe not, based on their history) is that Google doesn't know what Moore's law says.
"order of magnitude better...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)"
Uh, no. Moore's law says nothing at all about performance. It speaks to the number of transistors. It was Dave House who predicted a doubling in performance every 18 months (Moore predicted doubling transistor counts every 2 years). Both were based on the size and/or speed of transistors, neither took changes in processor architecture into consideration.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Most people who aren't chip architects don't really care one way or another about transistor density, other than that it was a convenient proxy for performance, the frequent doubling of which ordinary people do care about. Now that transistor density has largely hit a physics wall, perhaps we need a new term for the projected trajectory of performance that would have continued had physics allowed transistors to be infinitely small, which engineers are attempting to satisfy by coming up with novel architectures instead.
So, you're saying this is the first time they are making computations on a computer?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wouldn't seven years be between 4 and 5 generations?
Perhaps when it isn't something that is likely to take multiple lines of work out in one shot, I'll be for it.
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This is BS. Yes, there have been research papers on approximate computing in HW but none of them can give error bounds for applications. Your errors reported will be only on the inputs you run, anything else and all bets are off.
Was that not something introduces about 20 years ago by Silicon Graphics? Or am I getting old
http://manx.classiccmp.org/mir...
Not related to the wizard Tensor of Tensor's Floating Disc.
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Am I reading this right, the basic gist of the article is that custom, purposebuilt chips are faster at very specific tasks than general all-purpose chips?
Such amaze, much fast, wow.
Nope. People do care about density, which [...]
haha, you're cute.
Go ask 50 random people on the street if they care about transistor density and report back to us.
"Google's Law" states that whenever you need to make something sound cool and innovative, just misuse and existing term like "Moore's Law", because reporters are stupid.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Not if your stuff is massively parallel. For example on a 100 watt GPU, doubled performance per watt translates to doubled performance - if there's no significant bandwith bottleneck etc.
If you're the bad ass dude who wants a 250 watt GPU and nothing else it's the exact same deal. There are a few cards that eat even more but nobody will make a kilowatt GPU (single) just for you.
See, this is what's wrong with polls.
"Do you care about transistor density?", will get a lot of "Huh?", which will be interpreted as "no, does not care".
"Transistor density is one of the biggest factors in computer speed. Do you care about making transistors more dense in the future to improve computer speed?" will get a lot of "Yes", because people want the computer speed, even if they don't understand transistor density.
Polling has gotten a bad name because the loaded questions spew the results, and make headlines.
Oh, I didn't give this the right headline -- "Slashdot Readers Care More About The Headline", because of the poll question, "Will a bad, uninformative headline that doesn't interest you result in your not clicking on the story?"
The real question on advances over GPU's: Can it mine bitcoin faster and for less electricity?