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Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by yabones on Monday March 17, 2025 @11:14AM (#43389432)
They're more or less dev boards, but they absolutely do sell TPU modules that you can stick right into a M.2 or mini PCIe slot.

https://coral.ai/products/

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by do_not_redeem on Monday March 17, 2025 @11:29AM (#43389575)
I have to say these seem like hobbyist-level products. For example https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu can do 8 TOPS, but a 5-year-old RTX 2060 gets you 50 TOPS. A newer H100 gets you 3958 TOPS.

Nobody's going to buy 500 of those chips and stick them in 500 M.2 slots to match the performance of a single H100.

Do they make any better chips that I missed?

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by margalabargala on Monday March 17, 2025 @12:14PM (#43390045)
I would call them less hobbyist products, and more compute for IOT/edge devices. They aren't made for a datacenter and aren't trying to compete with an H100.

Yes, it has one sixth the performance of a RTX 2060, but it has one-five-hundredth the volume. For a specific siloed application, 8 TOPS is plenty. Think image processing, etc.

There are plenty of production use cases where that makes sense and an H100 does not.

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by pclmulqdq on Monday March 17, 2025 @04:22PM (#43392379)
At this point, these chips aren't anywhere close to the frontier of capability for embedded accelerators, and certainly don't merit an entire M.2 slot in a serious design.

These are at 5-year-old design and it shows.

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by margalabargala on Monday March 17, 2025 @06:25PM (#43393365)
Fair, the actual M2 version linked would not be what would be used beyond convenient development.

The actual TPU chip itself from the M2 card is sold individually as a surface mount chip and that is what would be used in a "serious" design.

https://coral.ai/products/accelerator-module

I did a cursory search and I can find zero other products that compete with that module, within an order of magnitude of power consumption/price/etc

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by pclmulqdq on Monday March 17, 2025 @07:28PM (#43393847)
At this point, nobody sells modules for this, and I doubt many coral chips still sell. The current slot for an ML accelerator at about 10 TOPS is as a peripheral on an SoC. Most serious SoCs have one.

In other words, the reason you didn't find a commercial competitor to these things is that the competitor is (nearly) free.

Here's one vendor: https://www.ti.com/technologies/edge-ai.html

Re:When the Dotcom Bubble Burst by bornfreddy on Monday March 17, 2025 @04:41PM (#43392532)
I didn't know this form exists - sounds ideal for a project I had in mind. Thanks for posting!