Tensor Processing Unit – Perspectives

Excerpt from a James Hamilton review

"I just read about another excellent example higher-level application acceleration. In fact this best example I’ve seen publicly disclosed so far. The paper “In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processor Unit” will be presented at the upcoming 44th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) to be held in Toronto Canada June 26, 2017.
In my opinion, this is excellent work, a well-written paper, and a balanced analysis of what they produced and started to deploy back in 2015. It’s the normal practice in our industry to only show that which has already been replaced or is about to be replaced but that’s just the reality of commercial innovation and I do the same thing myself.
What I found most striking is the elegant simplicity of what has been done. It wins over general purpose Intel processors and Nvidia GPGPUs of the same generation by the greater than 10x we would expect and yet, they have kept the part simple and shown good taste in what to include and what not to. The paper uses power/performance as a proxy for the price/performance they know they should be using but since this is commercial innovation, pricing needs to remains confidential."

Tensor Processing Unit – Perspectives