Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip

Re:Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custo... by arcanus on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @05:04PM (#11725948)

Sure... I think you are missing the point. In Nov., the Nature paper which contains the AlphaGo algorithm, the hardware detailed was exclusively CPU+GPUs.

Between that time and the Lee Sedol match, the hardware running AlphaGo was switched, to these TPU.

From the paper: "The final version of AlphaGo used 40 search threads, 48 CPUs, and 8 GPUs. We also implemented a distributed version of AlphaGo that exploited multiple machines, 40 search threads, 1,202 CPUs and 176 GPUs."

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Re:Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custo... by dsl on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @06:07PM (#11726397)

Or they consider the TPU to be something similar to a math co-processor, it just offloads work from the CPU. They also didn't discuss the custom built power modules, or the custom built network switches used for interconnects.

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