Tensor Processing Unit
This chapter introduces the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a special chip developed at Google for ultra-fast execution of neural network mathematical operations. As with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), the idea here is to have a special processor focusing only on very fast matrix operations, with no support for all the other operations normally supported by Central Processing Units (CPUs). However, the additional improvement with TPUs is to remove from the chip any hardware support for graphics operations normally present in GPUs (rasterization, texture mapping, frame buffer operations, and so on). Think of a TPU as a special purpose co-processor specialized for deep learning, being focused on matrix or tensor operations. In this chapter, we will compare CPUs and GPUs with the four generations of TPUs and with Edge TPUs. All these accelerators are available as of April 2022. The chapter will include code examples of using TPUs.
In this chapter, you will...
