Google is Releasing Cloud TPU Machine Learning Accelerators

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rgMekanic

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Google announced in a blog post yesterday that it's new Cloud TPUs are available in beta on the google Cloud Platform. The Cloud TPUs are a Googlse-designed hardware accelerator that is optimized for specific machine learning workloads programmed with TensorFlow. Each Cloud TPU has four custom ASICs, 64GB of HBM, and pack up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance, and can be used alone, or networked in a multi-petaflop "TPU Pod."

Seriously powerful hardware available for a relatively good price. Just imagine how much AI porn one of those things could crank out.

Cloud TPUs are available in limited quantities today and usage is billed by the second at the rate of $6.50 USD / Cloud TPU / hour.
We’re thrilled to see the enthusiasm that customers have expressed for Cloud TPUs. To help us manage demand, please sign up here to request Cloud TPU quota and describe your ML needs. We’ll do our best to give you access to Cloud TPUs as soon as we can.
 
64GB of HBM? no wonder there's been shortages.
For a memory that was supposed to die, and die soon it seems to keep popping up.
 
BloodyIron said:
Ladies and gentlemen. The modern vendor lock in!
Click to expand...

To be honest there's an element of lock in just by virtue of the technology. The barriers to changing can get pretty high pretty quick. That's not so much the underlying hardware as much as the work and skill sets of the people doing it. There's a pretty long ramp up to being productive again.

I've got people doing some awesome things but it always boggles my mind. Shame I never really knew that discrete math was going to be so important in the 21st century when I was picking courses for college. I just smile and nod
 
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