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Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by throwaway48476 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @10:45AM (#43632727)
Its hard to be excited about hardware that will only exist in the cloud before shredding.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by crazygringo on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:54AM (#43633514)
You can't get excited about lower prices for your cloud GPU workloads thanks to the competition it brings to Nvidia?

This benefits everyone, even if you don't use Google Cloud, because of the competition it introduces.

Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @02:30PM (#43635645)
I like owning things
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by sodality2 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:02PM (#43637961)
Cloud will buy less NVDA chips, and since they're related goods, prices will drop.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by throwaway48476 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @10:42PM (#43640135)
Pricing is based on competitors more than demand.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by xadhominemx on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:04PM (#43637975)
You own any GB200s?
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by baobabKoodaa on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:10PM (#43638030)
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by simondotau on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @09:56PM (#43639900)
Seriously yes. I don’t want to own rapidly depreciating hardware if I don’t have to.

I don’t want to own open source software and I’d prefer if culture was derived from and contributed to the public domain.

I’m still fully on board with capitalism, but there are many instances where I’d prefer to replace physical acquisition with renting, or replacing corporate-made culture with public culture.

Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by throwaway48476 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @10:44PM (#43640153)
Nvidia cloud instances have competition. What happens when you get vendor lock in with TPU and have no exit plan? Arguably it's competition that drives value creation, not capitalism.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by simondotau on Thursday April 10, 2025 @02:17AM (#43641174)
Just don’t let yourself get stuck behind vendor lock-in, or if you do, never let yourself feel trapped, because you never are.

Whenever assessing the work involved in building an integration, always assume you’ll be doing it twice. If that sounds like too much work then you shouldn’t have outsourced to begin with.

Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by throwaway48476 on Saturday April 12, 2025 @12:43AM (#43661420)
Switching costs are a thing everywhere in the economy. Measure twice cut once. Planning on doing the work twice is asinine.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by simondotau on Thursday April 17, 2025 @08:33AM (#43715867)
Then you shouldn’t have outsourced to begin with.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by karmasimida on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @09:09PM (#43639661)
Oh, you own the generator for you GPU as well?
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by Koshcheiushko on Thursday April 10, 2025 @12:47AM (#43640713)
And time, energy to maintain that.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by throwaway48476 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @03:18PM (#43636473)
It's only competitive with nvidia if you believe Google won't kill this product like everything else.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by maxrmk on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @04:14PM (#43637312)
I love to hate on google, but I suspect this is strategic enough that they wont kill it.

Like graviton at AWS its as much of a negotiation tool as it is a technical solution, letting them push harder with NVIDIA on pricing because they have a backup option.

Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by mmx1 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:11PM (#43638036)
Google has done stuff primarily for negotiation purposes (e.g. POWER9 chips) but TPU ain't one. It's not a backup option or presumed "inferior solution" to NVIDIA. Their entire ecosystem is TPU-first.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by lostmsu on Thursday April 10, 2025 @11:33AM (#43644955)
Was Gemini 2.5 trained on TPUs thought? I seem to be struggling to find that information. Wouldn't they want to mention it in every press release?
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by mmx1 on Thursday April 10, 2025 @01:30PM (#43646189)
Pretty sure the answer is yes. I have no direct knowledge of the matter for Gemini 2.5, but in general TPUs were widely used for training at Google. Even Apple used them to train their Apple Intelligence models. It’s not some esoteric thing to train on TPU; I would consider using GPU for that inside Google esoteric.

P.S. I found an on-the-record statement re Gemini 1.0 on TPU:

"We trained Gemini 1.0 at scale on our AI-optimized infrastructure using Google’s in-house designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. And we designed it to be our most reliable and scalable model to train, and our most efficient to serve."

Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by joshuamorton on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:31PM (#43638240)
Google's been doing custom ML accelerators for 10 years now, and (depending on how much you're willing to stretch the definition) has been doing them in consumer hardware for soon to be five years (the Google Tensor chips in pixel phones).
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by p_j_w on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @10:48AM (#43632763)
I think this article is for Wall Street, not Silicon Valley.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by mycall on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:51AM (#43633483)
Bad timing as I think Wall Street is preoccupied at the moment.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by asdfman123 on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:37PM (#43638288)
Oh, believe me, they are very much paying attention to tech stocks right now.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by SquareWheel on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @07:26PM (#43639078)
Must be part of that Preoccupy Wall Street movement.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by noitpmeder on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:40AM (#43633364)
What's their use case?
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by fennokin on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @11:43AM (#43633404)
As in for investor sentiment, not literally finance companies.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by amelius on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @12:27PM (#43633953)
Gambling^H^H^H^H Making markets more "efficient".
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by killerstorm on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @08:53PM (#43639584)
It might also be for people who consider working for Google...
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by jeffbee on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @10:55AM (#43632861)
Ogg no care multi-axis computer-numerical machine center. Ogg no space Ogg cave for nonsense. Ogg bang rock scrape hide.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by CursedSilicon on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @04:40PM (#43637686)
Please don't make low-effort bait comments. This isn't Reddit
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by justanotheratom on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @01:41PM (#43634946)
exactly. I wish Groq would start selling their cards that they use internally.
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by xadhominemx on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:05PM (#43637982)
They would lose money on every sale
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by foota on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:25PM (#43638173)
Personally, I have a (non-functional) TPU sitting on my desk at home :-)
Re:Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference by prometheon1 on Thursday April 10, 2025 @07:41AM (#43642864)
You don't find news about quantum computers exciting at all? I personally disagree