Did Google Invent their TPUs Based on Alex's Invention?
Did Google Invent their TPUs Based on Alex's Invention?
Yes, absolutely. Before 2012, Google used standard CPU servers for everything. When Alex Krizhevsky proved in 2012 that matrix-multiplying GPUs were the absolute king of AI, Google instantly bought his company and bought thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.
However, Google quickly realized that buying tens of thousands of gaming or enterprise GPUs from NVIDIA would be astronomically expensive.
Taking inspiration from the realization that AI is just massive matrix math, Google engineers decided to build their own custom ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) dedicated only to matrix math. In 2015, they deployed the first TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). The TPU stripped away all the video-game logic in an NVIDIA GPU and focused entirely on the Systolic Arrays we discussed earlier to accelerate the exact math Alex Krizhevsky popularized.
data by Google AI...
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