Google has a new chip that makes machine learning way faster

Google has taken a big leap forward with the speed of its machine learning systems by creating its own custom chip that it's been using for over a year. The company was rumored to have been designing its own chip, based partly on job ads it posted in recent years. But until today it had kept the effort largely under wraps. It calls the chip a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In a blog post, Google engineer Norm Jouppi refers to it as an accelerator chip, which means it speeds up a specific task.