Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs

Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by dalemhurley on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:18PM (#50172063)

Google and Apple are going to move consumers and ordinary business users to edge inference. This is more disruptive to the upcoming IPOs than most investors understand.

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by anuptalwalkar on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:24PM (#50174078)

I would love to see them move off into edge computing. There should be some autonomy and siloed experience in day to day usage.

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by tjwebbnorfolk on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:50PM (#50173780)

I would love to be able to buy a TPU for inference

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by gnabgib on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:06PM (#50174830)

You can.. they're called Coral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit#Edge_TP... https://developers.google.com/coral https://physicalailab.io/en/google-coral-tpu-edge-tpu-status...

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by Dr4kn on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:19AM (#50176742)

They are just wildly outdated for most tasks. Even projects like frigate suggest buying different hardware. Coral was released in 2019 and hasn't been updated once. With a jetson nano or even a raspi ai hat you get way more tops

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by tjwebbnorfolk on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @11:24AM (#50182602)

Ok I'll clarify: I want to buy a current-ish generation of TPU that can run LLMs. Coral is like 8 years old now

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by n8henrie on Thursday October 22, 2026 @09:49AM (#50195317)

I've been really hoping to get Whisper running on a coral, but it can't even do that. There was recently some progress getting it to export to tflite (and even an official example added) but the coral is missing some instructions.

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by emmelaich on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:07PM (#50174839)

You can buy a Google Coral TPU, does that count?

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by Dr4kn on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:31AM (#50176835)

With them being released in 2019 with zero hardware revisions they are just outdated for almost every workload

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by lofties on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:03PM (#50174811)

Google, Apple, and don't forget our friends DeepSeek!

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Re:Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end f... by villgax on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:36AM (#50180733)

Yeah right, try generating an image on Apple Silicon or an Android phone with any of the Qwen or Flux family of models, let alone videos or prefill heavy LLMs.

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