Do you know your TPUs from your GPUs?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

GPUs, where graphics processing units, have become the most important commodity in the

AI boom, and made Nvidia a multi-trillion dollar company.

But they could have competition from a different three-letter chip, the TPU or Tensor

processing unit. These are developed by Google,

specifically for AI workloads. Anthropic, OpenAI, and meta have reportedly made deals for Google

TPUs. For more on what this means, we've got Christopher Miller, historian at Tufts and author of the book,

Chip War.

Google was realizing that because it owned YouTube and Google Search and many other applications

had to do many of the same types of calculations.

And that was why Google started devising its own in-house chip design arm.

And that lets them be faster than the more general purpose AI chips that

Nvidia sells, or faster at least for the specific use cases that Google needs them for.

Yeah.

I mean, what kinds of advantages do TPUs have over GPUs for these specific use cases?

Well, it's really all about speed and power consumption. The more tailored the chip to a specific

use, the more it can be efficient than a general purpose chip. But there's another side of that

tradeoff, which is that the more specific the chip,

the fewer the use cases it can be used for,

which is why for most of the AI ecosystem,

...