<story><title> Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/google-announces-a-new-generation-for-its-tpu-machine-learning-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sabalaba</author><text>This is great news. It’s extremely important to the research community that large companies enter into the DL silicon space to contend with NVIDIA’s monopoly.&lt;p&gt;NVIDIA is now exerting pricing power to the point where they’ve decided to train their sales people to disregard the metric that is most important to customers: cost of training. Talk with one of their enterprise sales people and you’ll find they’ll say things like “FLOPS &amp;#x2F; $ doesn’t matter” to justify a 10x increase in price for their TESLA line. As history has shown, a monopolist sows the seeds of their own destruction and, by disregarding the metrics that matter, they alienate their customers.&lt;p&gt;Here are open source projects that you can contribute to to break the monopoly:&lt;p&gt;ROCm: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rocm.github.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rocm.github.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIOpen: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&amp;#x2F;MIOpen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&amp;#x2F;MIOpen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;TensorFlow: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;tensorflow&amp;#x2F;tensorflow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;tensorflow&amp;#x2F;tensorflow&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title> Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/google-announces-a-new-generation-for-its-tpu-machine-learning-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Voloskaya</author><text>&amp;gt; Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the new TPU is eight times more powerful than last year&lt;p&gt;Are we sure about this? He specifically said that a &amp;quot;pod&amp;quot; would be 8 times faster than last year, not the TPU itself.&lt;p&gt;And the picture in the background showed what looked like to be 8 racks of 64 TPUs (or maybe 32?). Until now a &amp;quot;pod&amp;quot; was a single rack of 64 TPUs.
So if the new definition for a &amp;quot;pod&amp;quot; is 8 times as many TPUs as it was before, the result is less impressive...&lt;p&gt;Is there any actual spec released?</text></comment>