Tensor Processing Unit
History
Google's TPUs are proprietary. Some models are commercially available, and on February 12, 2018, The New York Times reported that Google "would allow other companies to buy access to those chips through its cloud-computing service." Google has said that they were used in the AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol series of human-versus-machine Go) games, as well as in the AlphaZero system, which produced Chess, Shogi and Go playing programs from the game rules alone and went on to beat the leading programs in those games. Google has also used TPUs for Google Street View text processing and was able to find all the text in the Street View database in less than five days. In Google Photos, an individual TPU can process over 100 million photos a day. It is also used in RankBrain which Google uses to provide search results.
History
Google provides third parties access to TPUs through its Cloud TPU service as part of the Google Cloud Platform and through its notebook-based services Kaggle and Colaboratory.
First generation TPU
The first-generation TPU is an 8-bit matrix multiplication engine, driven with CISC instructions by the host processor across a PCIe 3.0 bus. It is manufactured on a 28 nm process with a die size ≤ 331 mm2. The clock speed is 700 MHz and it has a thermal design power of 28–40 W. It has 28 MiB of on chip memory, and 4 MiB of 32-bit accumulators) taking the results of a 256×256 systolic array of 8-bit multipliers. Within the TPU package is 8 GiB of dual-channel 2133 MHz DDR3 SDRAM offering 34 GB/s of bandwidth. Instructions transfer data to or from the host, perform matrix multiplications or convolutions, and apply activation functions.
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