New TPU Accelerator Chip from Google Speeds Machine Learning - Enterprise Hardware on Top Tech News

When he introduced the TPU at the I/O conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said it provides an order of magnitude better performance per watt than existing chips for machine learning tasks. While it's unlikely to usurp CPUs and GPUs already in use in the machine learning world, the TPU could potentially speed the machine learning process without using much more energy. Google has been carefully guarding the details of the TPU project, but it's been generally understood that the project was in progress. Based on the company's job postings, it had become evident over the past year that Google was working on a chip of some kind. Now, Google confirms the chip has been under development for about two years.