TPU Is Google's Seven Year Lead In AI

The application that the TPUs are specific to is TensorFlow and neural networks in particular. One of the big bottlenecks here is the huge computing power it takes to train and even use such big deep neural networks. Google now has a short cut. It claims that using TPUs is an order of magnitude better-optimized for performance per watt than other approaches. This is vague, but it is also claimed to have moved the technology about seven years into the future - or three generations of Moore's law.