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A comment on Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture. Parent comment

Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by summerlight on Monday March 25, 2024 @09:23PM (#39823350)
> Now of course Google should spin off the TPU team as a separate company.

Given the size of the market and its near-monopoly situation, I strongly think this has the potential to (almost immediately) surpass the Pixel hardware business. But the problem here is that TPU is a relatively scarce computing resource even inside Google and it's very likely that Google has a hard time to meet its internal demands...

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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by fnbr on Monday March 25, 2024 @09:50PM (#39823488)
I’m surprised they sell any to external customers, to be honest.
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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by KeplerBoy on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @04:11AM (#39825260)
They don't sell any TPUs, do they? Besides the, now ancient, coral toy-TPUs.
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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by Kelteseth on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @05:09AM (#39825658)
Has there been any development? The last update is from 2021 [0], but it is not officially killed by google(.com)

[0] https://coral.ai/news/updates-07-2021

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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by ddalex on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @06:34AM (#39826159)
My guess is that the "AI" accelerators in Google Tensor phone chips are based on Coral....
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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by fnbr on Saturday March 30, 2024 @01:33PM (#39876825)
I meant rent on GCP. You’re right.
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Re:Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture by nl on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @02:05AM (#39824669)
> I strongly think this has the potential to (almost immediately) surpass the Pixel hardware business. But the problem here is that TPU is a relatively scarce computing resource even inside Google and it's very likely that Google has a hard time to meet its internal demands...

Yes.

But imagine how the company would do: they have a guaranteed market at Google say for 3 years, and while yes maybe Google takes 100% of the production in the first 12 months it's not a bad position to start from.

Plus there are other products which they could ship that might not always need to be built on the latest process. I imagine there would be demand for inference only earlier generation TPUs that can run LLMs fast if the power usage is low enough.

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