TPUv2 Benchmarks (Yup, they’re fast)
RiseML benchmarked Google’s TPUv2 , and — surprise! — they’re fast. Also — surprise! — they’re cost efficient too. I know, shocking, right? After all, if you consider selection-bias, of course they wouldn’t release something that wasn’t fast, and of course they’d price it so that it would be cost efficient. Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time a company has done something stupid, so, hey, we should probably keep that in mind . Anyhow, it turns out that the TPUv2 is around 7.3x faster than an Nvidia P100, and around 2.8x faster than an Nvidia V100. Yes, it’s more expensive, but you actually end up saving on a $ per hour basis — it’s that much faster. It’s important to note that the TPUv2 is not just a speeded up version of the TPUv1 — it’s quite a different beast. Unlike the TPUv1, which was focused on inference, the TPUv2 is actually focused on speeding up learning. Inside, it has systolic arrays (•) which do ...