Google Details New TensorFlow Optimized ASIC

Norm Jouppi, a distinguished hardware engineer at Google, detailed the company's public disclosure of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) last week after the CEO Sundar Pichai's earlier announcement at Google I/O. Several questions came up around how the TensorFlow-optimized chipset could compete with publicly available hardware like Nvidia's Tesla P100 and even PaaS providers like Nervana that provide machine learning services. Google's public disclosure of the TPU may have been related to Nvidia's release of the Tesla P100 in April. Jouppi noted that Google wants to lead the industry in machine learning and make the innovation available to its customers, but didn't disclose specific plans or offerings to do so at this time.