On Tensors, Tensorflow, And Nvidia's Latest 'Tensor Cores'

Nvidia announced a brand new accelerator based on the company's latest Volta GPU architecture, called the Tesla V100. The chip's newest breakout feature is what Nvidia calls a "Tensor Core." According to Nvidia, Tensor Cores can make the Tesla V100 up to 12x faster for deep learning applications compared to the company's previous Tesla P100 accelerator. A tensor is a mathematical object represented by an array of components that are functions of the coordinates of a space. Google created its own machine learning framework that uses tensors because tensors allow for highly scalable neural networks. Google surprised industry analysts when it open sourced its Tensorflow machine learning software library, but this may have been a stroke of genius because Tensorflow quickly became one of the most popular machine learning frameworks used by developers.