Overview
Developed by Google, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a specialized hardware accelerator designed to speed up machine learning workloads, particularly those using the TensorFlow framework.
Key Features
- Matrix Processing: Optimized for the high-volume matrix operations common in neural network training and inference.
- Energy Efficiency: Provides higher performance per watt compared to general-purpose CPUs or GPUs for specific AI tasks.
- Scalability: Often deployed in large clusters (TPU Pods) within Google Cloud Platform.
Use Cases
- Training large-scale deep learning models.
- Real-time AI inference for services like Google Search and Translate.