Nvidia discusses Google TPU's performance versus modern Teslas
Just a few days back, Google published some interesting benchmarks of its Tensor Processing Unit, a custom-made ASIC targeted at AI inference applications. The numbers were pretty impressive. Google claimed that its TPU was roughly 15 times faster than an unspecified GPU (which we took to mean a Tesla) when running inference tasks, and a whopping 30 to 80 times better when it came to performance-per-watt. As the CEO of a prominent GPU vendor, it was only natural that Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang would want to weigh in on the performance numbers that Google shared.
Nvidia agrees with Google on a lot of points, namely the fact that the existence of dedicated hardware is what makes many modern AI applications scalable at all. However, Huang notes that the Google engineers compared their TPU to ...