<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><item><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></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twtw</author><text>Instead of being able to buy your own nvidia gpu and run any cuda or opencl on it, now you can run only tensor flow on a tpu only in Google cloud.&lt;p&gt;How fantastic.</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><item><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></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tehsauce</author><text>TPUs seem like great hardware. Unfortunately google&amp;#x27;s insistence on keeping them in a walled garden is a major deterrent to building something that relies on their platform.</text></comment>