YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs

42 points ilreb 1 hour ago 12 comments

Lucasoato 59 minutes ago | parent

Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud?

sschueller 52 minutes ago | parent

Google coral USB and m.2 devices are TPUs.

boulos 40 minutes ago | parent

Only in marketing name. They're not related otherwise.

westurner 52 minutes ago | parent

TPU / neural compute accelerator / Math coprocessor;

"OpenTPU: Open-Source Reimplementation of Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848676 :

> How does Cerebras WSE-3 with 44GB of 'L2' on-chip SRAM compare to Google's TPUs, Tesla's TPUs, NorthPole, Groq LPU, Tenstorrent's, and AMD's NPU designs?

There are TPUs made out of silicon carbide with standard fab.

There is in-flight tensor processing with photons, but that's not quite a TPU.

boulos 39 minutes ago | parent

Yes. Google is famously selling TPUs on prem to big customers (e.g., Anthropic) and Crux AI is now a venture to do just that.

npalli 56 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, Amazon doing the same for AWS Trainium.

https://github.com/aws-neuron/torch-neuronx

yipinwong 40 minutes ago | parent

Dumb question from non-AI engineer.

Is this somehow Google's answer to today's best DeepSeek open-sourcing inferencing engine?

bitpush 32 minutes ago | parent

I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.

Tanjreeve 27 minutes ago | parent

They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.

23agt 20 minutes ago | parent

Google is selling TPU shovels via Cloud services and also physically to select partners. So this makes sense.

There will be an abundance of shovels. Nebius already crashed by almost half from its hype peak.

airza 14 minutes ago | parent

it doesn't seem like there's an abundance of shovels coming anytime soon