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What makes the TPU different from your standard processor specifically?

Any time Google unveiled its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) with this year's Google I/O conference inside Mountain View, California, it finally ticked because of this editor in particular that machine learning could be the future of computing hardware.

Needless to say, the TPU is only an integral part of the firm's mission to press machine learning – the training that powers chat bots, Siri and stuff like that – forward. (It's also the chip that defeated the entire world Go champion recently. ) Google even offers TensorFlow, its open source selection of machine intelligence software.

And also sure, the chips that we find inside our laptops and smartphones will always get faster and more adaptable. But, it seems as if we now have already seen the extent with the computing experiences that these processors provides, if only limited by the particular devices they power.

Now, oahu is the TPU, a meticulous amalgamation of silicon built designed for one purpose, and other specialized processors equally already here (like Apple's M9 co-processor) also to come, that stands to push the particular advancement of mankind's processing power – and subsequently our device's capabilities – further and faster than previously.

So, we wanted to find out about this new kind of computer chip, how it's different exactly, exactly how powerful it is and how it absolutely was made. While Google Distinguished Hardware Manufacture Norm Jouppi wouldn't disclose much in regards to the chip's construction (it's apparently exactly that special to Google), he enlightened us over email regarding exactly what the TPU is capable of and its potential money for hard times of machine learning.

TechRadar: What exactly is the chip exactly?

Norm Jouppi: [The] Tensor Running Unit (TPU) is our initial custom accelerator ASIC [application-specific integrated circuit] regarding machine learning [ML], and it fits inside the same footprint as a hard disk drive. It is customized to give powerful and power efficiency when working TensorFlow.

Great software shines even brighter with great hardware underneath it.

What makes the TPU distinctive from your standard processor specifically?

TPUs are usually customized for machine learning software using TensorFlow. Note that we always use CPUs [central processing units] and GPUs [graphics processing units] regarding ML.

How does the computer chip operate any differently from typical CPUs?

Our custom TPU is unique in that it uses much less computational bits. It only fires up the bits that you might want, when you need them. This permits more operations per second, with all the same amount of silicon.

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