Re:Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs
by dharma1 on Thursday August 11, 2016 @10:33AM
(#12268528)
it sure does. I hope AWS and GCE will step up their GPU instance game
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GCE should offer Tensorflow instances sometime soon. Closed alpha now. This will be a nice offering from Google which is no doubt part of the reason they open sourced Tensorflow.
Which GPUs they offer and how much, nobody knows.
> Which GPUs they offer and how much, nobody knows.
They might not offer GPUs at all. It may be that Google is planning to build a cloud using their own proprietary "Tensor Processing Unit" chip designed for TensorFlow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit)
TPUs are only useful for prediction, not for training.
Unless I missed something, whether or not they are for training or inference has not been clarified.
They mention that they use them for inference in one of the TF papers; also the focus on per watt efficiency rather than speed/memory means it's probably for inference.