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_kst_ 48 minutes ago [-]
The article mentions "TPU" 79 times, but never explains what the term means.
(It's "Tensor Processing Unit".)
zamadatix 20 minutes ago [-]
There does come a point where if you're in the follow up article discussing what's new in 2 new variants of the 8th generation of a niche product for that vendor it stops being reasonable from them explaining what everything means each time and starts being reasonable to either click the links to the earlier introduction or search around for it to get a proper understanding as if you didn't know "TPU" was "Tensor Processing Unit" then there is a lot more you want to know before reading this article.
titzer 15 minutes ago [-]
Is it going to kill them to spell it out once?
Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation.
I wish Google Colab start to provide new TPU model, the most powerful we can get on Colab is still v6e-1 which is too small for serious work.
xiaoyu2006 2 hours ago [-]
And again no one can use it.
asdfasgasdgasdg 1 hours ago [-]
Plenty of people and firms use TPUs, both directly and indirectly. You can rent them via Google Cloud. Apple Intelligence and Anthropic both use them. And of course your Gemini traffic is using the TPUs as well.
Yajirobe 57 minutes ago [-]
I know right?
> TPUs are now a rapidly growing business with nearly 100 customers
‘Nearly 100 customers’ in 10 years isn’t very impressive
faangguyindia 51 minutes ago [-]
Each customer spending a billion dollars is impressive
cman1444 12 minutes ago [-]
Lots of impressive companies have one customer (the government).
IncreasePosts 34 minutes ago [-]
4 customers make up a majority of nvidias revenue
TacticalCoder 3 minutes ago [-]
> And again no one can use it.
So basically Google has both SOTA models (Argon and Carbon and top of the line TPUs, but...
Google is in trouble?
(reading HN search is dead and hence Google is done)
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
> And again no one can use it.
Did you by chance fail to read who builds these things?
It’s a competitive advantage which allows them to deliver lower cost per inference. If quality continues to asymptote, best value becomes most interesting to consumers.
Then again, if they can provide competition to Nvidia, it may force Nvidia to lower prices across the board.
titzer 14 minutes ago [-]
The huge capex of designing and taping out a chip generally means that you wanna make and sell as many of said chip as possible.
Twirrim 31 minutes ago [-]
They are finally starting to. Oracle just announced a week or so ago that they're going to be introducing TPUs to their cloud next year for customers to use.
Interesting times ahead with a number of chip makers now vying for this market. TPUs are a mature chip now which gives some strong advantage. At the same time as the TPU announcement, they also mentioned they'll be deploying Cerebras systems as well.
kccqzy 1 hours ago [-]
They do. In particular they sold to Anthropic.
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
Where's the watt/token or $/token figures for each of these?
And how does each compare to their NVDA price equivalent?
a1o 2 hours ago [-]
Is it just me or the write up have very little information? I can’t grasp how this compare to other tech.
danpalmer 57 minutes ago [-]
This is a marketing announcement, it's got the right level of info for the target audience. If you want more technical detail there's loads available elsewhere online.
waterTanuki 2 hours ago [-]
A product announcement page with 0 links to purchase or ways to purchase is useless.
Alien1Being 59 minutes ago [-]
So an announcement about a hypothetical highly effective new chemotherapy for glioblastoma, with no links for you to buy it yourself is useless ?
You are not the target market.
waterTanuki 55 minutes ago [-]
Then why is the page available for me to view?
asdfasgasdgasdg 16 minutes ago [-]
Continue to follow the analogy. When drug companies announce new chemotherapies or antibiotics, they still do press releases!
keyle 6 minutes ago [-]
New gpu chips are like the old IBM Watson. I'll never get one. "That's great, but it does nothing for me."
bigwheels 1 hours ago [-]
TFA makes some claims but offers zero data on specs or anything else. Is this a press release?
oofbey 53 minutes ago [-]
> While we’ve always co-designed our TPUs in partnership with Google DeepMind
I love it when companies expose their org charts publicly like this. As if anybody cares that they think about Google and DeepMind as different.
yieldcrv 2 hours ago [-]
I’m guessing their skipping the T8 Pro model for the T9
/sarcasm at the unoriginal naming scheme
sterlind 1 hours ago [-]
I'm hearing good things about the T1000. it's an ideal platform for highly survivable autonomous agents.
hi_hi 2 hours ago [-]
Typical Google. A literal headline “Opening up TPUs to every developer” but zero information or links on how I, a developer, can use said TPUs.
asdfasgasdgasdg 1 hours ago [-]
There are various bits of this blog post that detail how they’re making it easier for devs to use TPUs, particularly the discussion of TorchTPU and the attendant link. That being said if you’re looking for a link to a tutorial I think it’s easily findable on Google. “Tpu tutorial Google cloud” or “Tpu developer hub” would be good queries. For example [this](https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tpus/quickstart-c...) is at least somewhat responsive.
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
jiggawatts 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t know why everyone keeps complaining! It’s just a simple twenty-seven step process neatly spread across three portals! (Documentation coming soon.)
genghisjahn 2 hours ago [-]
You’ll know sign up is complete when you started getting charged.
ijidak 12 minutes ago [-]
Well... Hopefully...
Or you'll get charged, but some obscure internal flag will be out of sync and you can't get ahold of anyone to reset it.
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
I am ready for the post-agentic era now... The agentic era turned out to be the most proclaimed era in the history... It's time for a change.
(It's "Tensor Processing Unit".)
Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation.
> TPUs are now a rapidly growing business with nearly 100 customers
‘Nearly 100 customers’ in 10 years isn’t very impressive
So basically Google has both SOTA models (Argon and Carbon and top of the line TPUs, but...
Google is in trouble?
(reading HN search is dead and hence Google is done)
Did you by chance fail to read who builds these things?
Then again, if they can provide competition to Nvidia, it may force Nvidia to lower prices across the board.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/oracle-e...
Interesting times ahead with a number of chip makers now vying for this market. TPUs are a mature chip now which gives some strong advantage. At the same time as the TPU announcement, they also mentioned they'll be deploying Cerebras systems as well.
And how does each compare to their NVDA price equivalent?
You are not the target market.
I love it when companies expose their org charts publicly like this. As if anybody cares that they think about Google and DeepMind as different.
/sarcasm at the unoriginal naming scheme
Or you'll get charged, but some obscure internal flag will be out of sync and you can't get ahold of anyone to reset it.