The nuts and bolts of AI
Quotes from geeksforgeeks.org
Modern AI systems rely heavily on specialized hardware to train and run models efficiently. While GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have been the dominant choice for deep learning for nearly a decade, TPUs (Tensor Processing Units)-Google’s custom AI accelerators are now widely used to power large-scale machine learning and LLM workloads.
Modern AI systems rely heavily on specialized hardware to train and run models efficiently. While GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have been the dominant choice for deep learning for nearly a decade, TPUs (Tensor Processing Units)-Google’s custom AI accelerators are now widely used to power large-scale machine learning and LLM workloads.
GPUs were originally designed for graphics and later adapted for deep learning thanks to their thousands of parallel cores.
General-purpose parallel processor (graphics + compute + AI)
More flexible across workloads (NLP, CV, gaming, visualization, HPC)
Best support for PyTorch and broad CUDA ecosystem
Runs everywhere—cloud, on-prem, consumer devices
TPUs, on the other hand, are purpose-built by Google specifically for tensor and matrix operations used in neural networks.
Purpose-built AI accelerator for tensor/matrix math
Optimized for high-throughput deep learning tasks
Scales to thousands of chips in TPU Pods
Best performance with TensorFlow/JAX + XLA
Tensor Processing Unit
A TPU is a specialised piece of hardware that are used for major Large Language workloads and Machine Learning. As opposed to GPUs the TPU is a newer development extending the capabilities of the GPU to process "deep learnig".
The TPU seems to have been developed by Google. Nvidia have classically been the GPU leaders.
In the days of Bitcoin Mining the use of Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) hardware was being marketed to process blockchain hashes.
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The current debate on whether AI is going to be the "end of the world as we know it" is couched with the fact that the news media and the general public have no clue to what it is all about.
