back to article Wanna gobble Google's custom chips? Now you can – its Cloud TPUs at $6.50 an hour

Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips are now available to rent on its cloud platform as a beta-grade service. The Cloud TPU – formerly known as the TPU2 – is the second generation of Google’s homegrown math accelerators geared towards AI and machine learning workloads that rely on TensorFlow. While the first …

  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    "the advertising giant's internal deep-earning research team"

    It's like a Mars Bar deliciously melting in boiling money?

    (Okay Google, so how do I train the network to drive a Japanese-Scientists-designed sexbot that looks like a well-endowed 16-year old in a school uniform?)

  2. emmanuel goldstein

    Can I use it to mine Monero?

  3. Herby

    Begs the question...

    How much does it cost to mine bitcoin? Can it be done at a profit?

    Inquiring minds want to know.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Deepfakes as a service

    It's only a matter of time before any movie can be recast, at least visually, within seconds. CCTV frameups will proliferate too... alibi as a service will proliferate too.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: Deepfakes as a service

      Don't you mean : Pee-pee tapes As A Service ?

  5. Tom 7

    Shame Parrallella didnt get their 1024 core chip into production

    According to my cigarette packet that would have been a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper oer buck,

    And having it in your 'hand' not in googles is worth another couple of orders of magnitude too.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Shame Parrallella didnt get their 1024 core chip into production

      A chip in the data centre is worth a lot on the drawing board. The TPUs are custom chips for a fairly specific workload but they are not made at scale so can be expected to cost more per unit.

      However, for training it's often not the processors that are the problem but the bandwidth for uploading the data, hence, the idea of the pod which looks like it could be a winner.

      1. Tom 7

        Re: Shame Parrallella didnt get their 1024 core chip into production

        @Charlie Clark - have a look at the Parrallella design - its all open source. I'd imagine its pretty good for NN training. Havent quite found out how the TPUs are configured yet.

  6. Tom 7

    Being cheeky

    Does anyone know of a motherboard that is basically a GPU host - just needs a low power atom to load up the GPU and run a bit of linux for a human io?

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