Google brings 45 teraflops tensor flow processors to its compute cloud

Google has developed its second-generation tensor processor--four 45-teraflops chips packed onto a 180 TFLOPS tensor processor unit (TPU) module, to be used for machine learning and artificial intelligence--and the company is bringing it to the cloud. TPU-based computation will be available to Google Cloud Compute later this year. Typically in machine-learning workloads, initial training and model building are divided from the subsequent pattern matching against the model. The former workload is the one that is most heavily dependent on massive compute power, and it's this that has generally been done on GPUs. Google's first-generation TPUs were used for the second part--making inferences based on the model, to recognize images, language, or whatever.