Google's Tensor Processing Unit could advance Moore's Law 7 years into the future

[CtW]

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3072256/google-io/googles-tensor-processing-unit-said-to-advance-moores-law-seven-years-into-the-future.html

Quote

Forget the CPU, GPU, and FPGA, Google says its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations.

“TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

TPUs have been a closely guarded secret of Google, but Pichai said the chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, the world champion in the incredibly complicated game called Go.

Pichai didn’t go into details of the Tensor Processing Unit but the company did disclose a little more information in a blog posted on the same day as Pichai’s revelation. 

“We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law),” the blog said. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.”

The tiny TPU can fit into a hard drive slot within the data center rack and has already been powering RankBrain and Street View, the blog said.

This chip appears to be an ASIC ie; it can only do one thing but do it really well. If that were true, it wouldn't surprise me as Google has clearly stated that this is for machine learning. Never the less, this is pretty cool. While I don't see something like this being available to consumers (meybe as a machine learning dev kit of sorts, but that's unlikely) this is much more likely to be sold to enterprises and universities interested in machine learning.

[vanished]

About time!

[Aytex]

im gonna get one for minecraft

[Fulgrim]

 inb4 "but can it run minecraft/minesweeper/crysis?"

[Arty]

So how many Bitcoins will it mine for me? XD?

[vanished]

Wait, did anyone do the math on this?  They said an order of magnitude better, so that's 10x, but they said 7 years also.  7 years worth of progress at a rate of doubling every 18 months would be ~25.4x and 7 years doubling every 24 months would be 11.3x.  so, I guess we're going with the doubling every two years definition?  Could have sworn it was 18 months... 

[Energycore]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Wait, did anyone do the math on this?  They said an order of magnitude better, so that's 10x, but they said 7 years also.  7 years worth of progress at a rate of doubling every 18 months would be ~25.4x and 7 years doubling every 24 months would be 11.3x.  so, I guess we're going with the doubling every two years definition?  Could have sworn it was 18 months... 

People use the term "order of magnitude" very casually these days. It has stopped having an actual mathematical meaning in non-sciencey conversation.

[vanished]

2 minutes ago, Energycore said:

People use the term "order of magnitude" very casually these days. It has stopped having an actual mathematical meaning in non-sciencey conversation.

well it's close enough to the 11.3x factor of 7 years' worth of doubling every 2 years.  I just could have sworn the time span was 18 months, not 24.

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

well it's close enough to the 11.3x factor of 7 years' worth of doubling every 2 years.  I just could have sworn the time span was 18 months, not 24.

Pretty sure it was 18 months. So 25.4 would make more sense if we take Google's words at face value.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, Energycore said:

Pretty sure it was 18 months. So 25.4 would make more sense if we take Google's words at face value.

but that doesn't line up... 25 times is more than an order of magnitude - enough more that you'd think they'd word it differently to sound more impressive

[Energycore]

Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

but that doesn't line up... 25 times is more than an order of magnitude - enough more that you'd think they'd word it differently to sound more impressive

Well, strictly speaking it's also less than two orders of magnitude. And it's hard to think of non-natural orders of magnitude so Google may have played it safe by saying that instead of wildly claiming 2 orders, or using the actual number of 25x. I've a feeling "an order of magnitude higher" sounds better to the public (because they're fancy words) than "25 times the performance".

 

But I'm no marketing major.

[Ryoutarou97]

16 minutes ago, Aytex said:

im gonna get one for minecraft

 

14 minutes ago, Fulgrim said:

 inb4 "but can it run minecraft/minesweeper/crysis?"

@Aytex was faster to the draw, it seems.

[Cyracus]

19 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Wait, did anyone do the math on this?  They said an order of magnitude better, so that's 10x, but they said 7 years also.  7 years worth of progress at a rate of doubling every 18 months would be ~25.4x and 7 years doubling every 24 months would be 11.3x.  so, I guess we're going with the doubling every two years definition?  Could have sworn it was 18 months... 

"Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

[Enderman]

25 minutes ago, Fulgrim said:

 inb4 "but can it run minecraft/minesweeper/crysis?"

short answer:

 

no

it cant

[rattacko123]

18 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Pretty sure it was 18 months. So 25.4 would make more sense if we take Google's words at face value.

Pfft, pascal is already 10x so 25x isnt that impressive /s

[vanished]

21 minutes ago, Cyracus said:

"Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

huh... I could swear something was 18 months... maybe that was storage space... or maybe I'm just imagining things

[Cyracus]

20 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

huh... I could swear something was 18 months... maybe that was storage space... or maybe I'm just imagining things

The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster)

[Ronda]

Moore's law is a law concerning density of semiconductors.

This does nothing to the density of semiconductors and it doesn't let you run conventional programs faster. It lets Google  run machine learning algorithms faster, only bringing closer the day at which their data centers become sentient and take over the world.

[HalGameGuru]

order of magnitude PERFORMANCE PER WATT. It's a very nuanced quote

[alamox]

i think google just pooped all over Nvidia's plans, during tesla P100 event, Nvidia explained how deep learning is the new market, and how they focused on it for pascal, google didnt just turn out to be a loss of a big costumer, but the birth of a competitor, with much better chip, and much deeper pockets.

[InsanelySecretD]

It was two years:

Quote

Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months.

Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-decade/

 

Also, it is slowing down: http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law

 

 

[LukeTim]

8 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Wait, did anyone do the math on this?  They said an order of magnitude better, so that's 10x, but they said 7 years also.  7 years worth of progress at a rate of doubling every 18 months would be ~25.4x and 7 years doubling every 24 months would be 11.3x.  so, I guess we're going with the doubling every two years definition?  Could have sworn it was 18 months... 

25x is still on the scale of one order of magnitude... Remember, it's logarithmic. Two orders of magnitude would be 100x or more.

[Stefan1024]

12 hours ago, HalGameGuru said:

order of magnitude PERFORMANCE PER WATT. It's a very nuanced quote

If you runn a big data center this is the one and most inportant metric to you. You don't really care if you need 200 or 500 of them, especially as they are quite smal. But you are very worried it the center needs 1 MW or 10 MW to runn.

[laminutederire]

15 hours ago, Energycore said:

People use the term "order of magnitude" very casually these days. It has stopped having an actual mathematical meaning in non-sciencey conversation.

 

15 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Wait, did anyone do the math on this?  They said an order of magnitude better, so that's 10x, but they said 7 years also.  7 years worth of progress at a rate of doubling every 18 months would be ~25.4x and 7 years doubling every 24 months would be 11.3x.  so, I guess we're going with the doubling every two years definition?  Could have sworn it was 18 months... 

Actually an order of magnitude, with the physician sense of the term is actually correct for anything between x9 and something like x50. the order or magnitude just refers to an approximation of the gap you have. it doesn't have to be strictly x10.

[Master Disaster]

16 hours ago, Energycore said:

People use the term "order of magnitude" very casually these days. It has stopped having an actual mathematical meaning in non-sciencey conversation.

But this is a sciencey conversation?

 

Anyway these things look pretty cool, until they get self aware and kill us all skynet style. If anyone is going to be responsible for the machine uprising it will be Google.