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If you're interested in a peer reviewed scientific comparison, Google writes retrospective papers after contemporary TPUs and GPUs are deployed versus speculation about future products. The most recent compares TPU v4 and A100. (TPU v5 and H100 is for a future paper). Here is a quote from the abstract:

"Deployed since 2020, TPU v4 outperforms TPU v3 by 2.1x and improves performance/Watt by 2.7x. ... For similar sized systems, it is ~4.3x--4.5x faster than the Graphcore IPU Bow and is 1.2x--1.7x faster and uses 1.3x--1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100. TPU v4s inside the energy-optimized warehouse scale computers of Google Cloud use ~2--6x less energy and produce ~20x less CO2e than contemporary DSAs in typical on-premise data centers."

Here is a link to the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3579371.3589350



That quote is referring to the A100... the H100 used ~75% more power to deliver "up to 9x faster AI training and up to 30x faster AI inference speedups on large language models compared to the prior generation A100."[0]

Which sure makes the H100 sound both faster and more efficient (per unit of compute) than the TPU v4, given what was in your quote. I don't think your quote does anything to support the position that TPUs are noticeably better than Nvidia's offerings for this task.

Complicating this is that the TPU v5 generation has already come out, and the Nvidia B100 generation is imminent within a couple of months. (So, no, a comparison of TPUv5 to H100 isn't for a future paper... that future paper should be comparing TPUv5 to B100, not H100.)

[0]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-hopper-architecture...


As someone unfamiliar with this area, can one of the downvotes explain why they choose to downvote this? Is it wrong?


I'm sure it probably is faster for thier own workloads (which they are choosing to benchmark on), why bother making it if not. But that is clearly not universally true, a GPU is clearly more versatile. This means nothing to most if they can't for example train an LLM on them.




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