Google boffins pull back more of the curtain hiding TPU v4 secrets

Google on Wednesday revealed more details of its fourth-generation Tensor Processing Unit chip (TPU v4), claiming that its silicon is faster and uses less power than Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU. TPU v4 "is 1.2x–1.7x faster and uses 1.3x–1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100," said researchers from Google and UC Berkeley in a …

[Anonymous Coward]

2-6X less energy.

So split the difference and call it 4X less energy. Lets assume the opposition are pulling 500 Watts, so 4X that is 2000 Watts. So 500 Watts minus 2000 watts must mean these ships GENERATE 1500 Watts when in use.

[b0llchit]

Re: 2-6X less energy.

But of course! These chips are salvation. They will solve all our problems. AI is the solution to all our (energy) problems.

[druck]

Re: 2-6X less energy.

Yes, bloody arse backwards writing. "uses 1.3x–1.9x less power" should be "uses half to three quarters of the power" (0.53 to 0.77 if you really want it to 2 significant figures).

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: 2-6X less energy.

Don't forget the enigmatic extra unit: 1500 Watts per hour while in use!

[Ian 55]

I was looking forward to..

.. a story about Turbo Pascal Units, as introduced with TP4 back in 1987.

As WP says, these were "tightly linked to the internal structures of the compiler, rather than standard .OBJ linkable files. This improved compilation and linkage times, but meant that .TPU files could not be linked with the output of other languages or even used with different releases of Turbo Pascal unless recompiled from source."

[LionelB]

Re: I was looking forward to..

And you had to press the Turbo button on the front of your PC before compiling.

[William Towle]

Re: I was looking forward to..

> And you had to press the Turbo button on the front of your PC before compiling.

I had to wait for a PC with one of those.

I recall a friend at University bringing code for an assignment up to the labs and telling me the compilation of it "can't have worked, it normally takes around a minute". The Unix system* in front of him was so much faster than he was used to and it had given him the prompt back almost instantaneously - and done so silently since there were no errors.

_{(* and those were just the regular undergrad boxen; one or two beefier systems were ready to be discovered tucked away elsewhere)}