Google's second generation TPU chips takes machine learning processing to a new level

Google announced its next generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) machine learning chips at Google I/O today. These chips, which are designed specifically to speed up machine learning tasks, are supposed to be more capable than CPUs or even GPUs at these tasks and are an upgrade from the first generation of chips the company released at last year's I/O. And speed up they have. Google claims the each second-generation TPU can deliver up to 180 teraflops of performance. We will have to wait and see what the average benchmarks look like, but they are a step forward for more than speed.