CONFIRMED: Google bakes custom data centre chips Google's long-rumoured efforts to build its own silicon have come to fruition. The Alphabet subsidiary today revealed it has baked a custom ASIC it calls a “Tensor Processing Unit” (TPU) and has been using them for a year for the machine learning applications that fuel many of its services. “TPU is tailored to machine …
I kind of agree on this - why should Google give any information out on a piece of hardware it has designed and built for its own needs?
Google is a business and businesses tend to want to stay ahead of all the other businesses. So why give them the ability to keep up? Why not force everyone else to innovate in their own way and try and catch up, in the same way it has always been done?
Whilst I follow the logic that Google can do what they like with their own tech, sharing the details has encouraged a wider take up in the past (Thank you Sir Tim Berners-Lee) and has often been the un anticipated result in the face of company opposition anyway (IBM PC clones of the 1980s and 90s).
I get what you are saying, it helps foster innovation. But this is only innovation on Googles terms.
it makes much more sense for an organisation or company to go out there with the idea of beating Google at their own game instead of feeding from their table scraps.
Like Oracle designing its own CPU's for more efficient engines to process data from databases... future of IT is engineering, one would be thinking of software but really is in the hardware built where real efficacy/efficiency could take place.
"Like Oracle designing its own CPU's for more efficient engines to process data from databases..."
Sadly there is no credible independent evidence that they are succeeding. Oracle's SPECrate figures indicate that their cores are just as starved of cache & memory bandwidth as 18 core Xeons v3s.
Is it ironic that in the Demolished Man, a jingle / earworm with the line "tenser, said the tensor" was used to allow people to conceal their intentions from those that want to know their inner thoughts - telepaths, in the book, but perhaps an AI..?
Eight, sir; seven, sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;
Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun
- Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
Booth: Gun. Noun. Portable firearm. This device was widely utilized in the urban wars of the late twentieth century. Referred to as a pistol, a piece...
Simon Phoenix: Look I don't need a history lesson! C'mon, HAL, where are the god damn guns?
Moral Statute Machine: You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
Simon Phoenix: What? Fsck you!
Moral Statute Machine: Your repeated violation of the Verbal Morality Statute has caused me to notify the San Angeles Police Department. Please remain where you are for your reprimand.
Simon Phoenix: Yeah, right.
[police sirens approach]
Simon Phoenix: Fsckers are fast too.
Moral Statute Machine: You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
-- Demolition Man (1993)
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