Google's AI Processor is Inspired by Hearts – Intuition Machine – Medium

Google has finally released the technical details of its its Tensor Process Unit (TPU) ASIC. Surprisingly, at its core, you find something that sounds like its inspired by the heart and not the brain. It's called a "Systolic Array" and this computational device contains 256 x 256 8bit multiply-add computational units. A systolic array is not a new thing, it was described way back in 1982 by Kung from CMU in "Why Systolic Architectures?" Just to get myself dated, I still recall a time when Systolic machines were all the rage. Unlike other computational devices that treats scalar or vectors as primitives, Google's TPU treats matrices as primitives.