YHK - yet another hacker news clone

TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max

202 points _benx_ 3 hours ago 46 comments

gnabgib 3 hours ago | parent

Title: Our newest TPUs: 8tx and 8i Max, built for the agentic era Small discussion previously (16 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50425018

hi_hi 2 hours ago | parent

Typical Google. A literal headline “Opening up TPUs to every developer” but zero information or links on how I, a developer, can use said TPUs.

jiggawatts 2 hours ago | parent

I don’t know why everyone keeps complaining! It’s just a simple twenty-seven step process neatly spread across three portals! (Documentation coming soon.)

genghisjahn 2 hours ago | parent

You’ll know sign up is complete when you started getting charged.

ijidak 47 minutes ago | parent

Well... Hopefully...

Or you'll get charged, but some obscure internal flag will be out of sync and you can't get ahold of anyone to reset it.

asdfasgasdgasdg 1 hour ago | parent

There are various bits of this blog post that detail how they’re making it easier for devs to use TPUs, particularly the discussion of TorchTPU and the attendant link. That being said if you’re looking for a link to a tutorial I think it’s easily findable on Google. “Tpu tutorial Google cloud” or “Tpu developer hub” would be good queries. For example [this](https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tpus/quickstart-c...) is at least somewhat responsive.

qntty 2 hours ago | parent

Why doesn’t Google sell these?

0cf8612b2e1e 1 hour ago | parent

It’s a competitive advantage which allows them to deliver lower cost per inference. If quality continues to asymptote, best value becomes most interesting to consumers.

Then again, if they can provide competition to Nvidia, it may force Nvidia to lower prices across the board.

titzer 48 minutes ago | parent

The huge capex of designing and taping out a chip generally means that you wanna make and sell as many of said chip as possible.

kccqzy 1 hour ago | parent

They do. In particular they sold to Anthropic.

xdennis 33 minutes ago | parent

But they don't sell to you or I, which is what matters. Why would people care about Anthropic or Oracle?

And even if Google sold them, they probably won't sell any affordable ones. Nvidia sells DGX Spark, but who can afford to buy them?

Twirrim 1 hour ago | parent

They are finally starting to. Oracle just announced a week or so ago that they're going to be introducing TPUs to their cloud next year for customers to use.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/oracle-e...

Interesting times ahead with a number of chip makers now vying for this market. TPUs are a mature chip now which gives some strong advantage. At the same time as the TPU announcement, they also mentioned they'll be deploying Cerebras systems as well.

summerlight 10 minutes ago | parent

Because it has been historically strongly coupled to the Google infra, both hardware and software. Now the situation has improved and now they are selling this to external clients, though it is still in a limited fashion.

xiaoyu2006 2 hours ago | parent

And again no one can use it.

ur-whale 2 hours ago | parent

> And again no one can use it.

Did you by chance fail to read who builds these things?

asdfasgasdgasdg 1 hour ago | parent

Plenty of people and firms use TPUs, both directly and indirectly. You can rent them via Google Cloud. Apple Intelligence and Anthropic both use them. And of course your Gemini traffic is using the TPUs as well.

Yajirobe 1 hour ago | parent

I know right?

> TPUs are now a rapidly growing business with nearly 100 customers

‘Nearly 100 customers’ in 10 years isn’t very impressive

faangguyindia 1 hour ago | parent

Each customer spending a billion dollars is impressive

IncreasePosts 1 hour ago | parent

4 customers make up a majority of nvidias revenue

cman1444 47 minutes ago | parent

Lots of impressive companies have one customer (the government).

TacticalCoder 38 minutes ago | parent

> And again no one can use it.

So basically Google has both SOTA models (Argon and Carbon and top of the line TPUs, but...

Google is in trouble?

(reading HN search is dead and hence Google is done)

ur-whale 2 hours ago | parent

Where's the watt/token or $/token figures for each of these?

And how does each compare to their NVDA price equivalent?

waterTanuki 2 hours ago | parent

A product announcement page with 0 links to purchase or ways to purchase is useless.

Alien1Being 1 hour ago | parent

So an announcement about a hypothetical highly effective new chemotherapy for glioblastoma, with no links for you to buy it yourself is useless ?

You are not the target market.

waterTanuki 1 hour ago | parent

Then why is the page available for me to view?

asdfasgasdgasdg 51 minutes ago | parent

Continue to follow the analogy. When drug companies announce new chemotherapies or antibiotics, they still do press releases!

a1o 2 hours ago | parent

Is it just me or the write up have very little information? I can’t grasp how this compare to other tech.

danpalmer 1 hour ago | parent

This is a marketing announcement, it's got the right level of info for the target audience. If you want more technical detail there's loads available elsewhere online.

yieldcrv 2 hours ago | parent

I’m guessing their skipping the T8 Pro model for the T9

/sarcasm at the unoriginal naming scheme

sterlind 1 hour ago | parent

I'm hearing good things about the T1000. it's an ideal platform for highly survivable autonomous agents.

dude250711 1 hour ago | parent

I am ready for the post-agentic era now... The agentic era turned out to be the most proclaimed era in the history... It's time for a change.

ryandrake 1 hour ago | parent

I can't take anyone who uses "agentic" seriously.

timcobb 17 minutes ago | parent

Agentic (seriously)

bigwheels 1 hour ago | parent

TFA makes some claims but offers zero data on specs or anything else. Is this a press release?

oofbey 1 hour ago | parent

> While we’ve always co-designed our TPUs in partnership with Google DeepMind

I love it when companies expose their org charts publicly like this. As if anybody cares that they think about Google and DeepMind as different.

_kst_ 1 hour ago | parent

The article mentions "TPU" 79 times, but never explains what the term means.

(It's "Tensor Processing Unit".)

hellohello2 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe they assumed you would just Google it ;)

zamadatix 55 minutes ago | parent

There does come a point where if you're in the follow up article discussing what's new in 2 new variants of the 8th generation of a niche product for that vendor it stops being reasonable from them explaining what everything means each time and starts being reasonable to either click the links to the earlier introduction or search around for it to get a proper understanding as if you didn't know "TPU" was "Tensor Processing Unit" then there is a lot more you want to know before reading this article.

titzer 50 minutes ago | parent

Is it going to kill them to spell it out once?

Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation.

mathisfun123 28 minutes ago | parent

> Is it going to kill them to spell it out once?

would it kill you to use an internet search engine (such as google)?

halJordan 31 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. I think you're saying that because this is your niche and finding the term isn't difficult for you.

However, consider the Tolkien community. I enjoy lord of the rings and want to know more. But there's an absurd acronym for another book (home) that no one ever expands in that community. And it's not in the wiki's and it's not in Google (bc what do you get if you google "tolkien home"?) it was intentionally frustrating for me to figure out what that acronym was. The people in the tolkien community also adopted your pov and just wouldn't help, expecting new people to bootstrap themselves. It was not a fun experience. These styling conventions aren't for the 99% of the time they're for the 1% of the time.

mgiampapa 26 minutes ago | parent

It's not an intuitive leap to google "tolkien home acronym" of which both the AI summary and the first result give the answer.

Melatonic 2 minutes ago | parent

It's also quite similar to CPU

But yeah in general it's nice to at least explain the acronym once

mekpro 1 hour ago | parent

I wish Google Colab start to provide new TPU model, the most powerful we can get on Colab is still v6e-1 which is too small for serious work.

keyle 40 minutes ago | parent

New gpu chips are like the old IBM Watson. I'll never get one. "That's great, but it does nothing for me."