Google built a processor just for AI

Google is no stranger to building hardware for its data centers, but it's now going so far as to design its own processors. The internet giant has revealed the Tensor Processing Unit, a custom chip built expressly for machine learning. As Google doesn't need high precision for artificial intelligence tasks, the TPU is focused more on raw operations per second than anything else -- it's an "order of magnitude" faster in AI than conventional processors at similar energy levels. It's space-efficient, too, fitting into the hard drive bays in data center racks.