TensorFlow and training performance

TensorFlow can speed up our machine learning tasks significantly. To understand how it can do this, let's begin by discussing some of the performance challenges we typically run into when we run expensive calculations on our hardware. Then, we will take a high-level look at what TensorFlow is and what our learning approach will be in this chapter.

Performance challenges

The performance of computer processors has, of course, been continuously improving in recent years, and that allows us to train more powerful and complex learning systems, which means that we can improve the predictive performance of our machine learning models. Even the cheapest desktop computer hardware that's available right now comes with processing units that have multiple cores.

In the previous chapters, we saw that many functions in scikit-learn allow us to spread those computations over multiple processing units. However, by default, Python is limited to...