Advantages of TPUs

The first and foremost advantage that TPUs offer over GPUs and CPUs is performance. Google compared the TPU performance to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and a NVIDIA K80 GPU running the benchmark code representative of 95% of the inference workload; it found that the TPU is 15-30 times faster than both NVIDIA's GPU and Intel's CPU.

The second important parameter is the power consumption. It is important to reduce power consumption since it has a twofold energy benefit: not only does it reduce the amount of power consumed, it also saves power by reducing the cooling cost to dissipate the heat generated while processing. The TPU/CPU per watt performance shows a 30-80 times improvement over other CPU and GPU configurations.

Another advantage of TPUs is their minimal and deterministic design since they have to execute only one task at a time.

As compared to CPUs and GPUs, the single-threaded TPU has none of the sophisticated microarchitectural features that consume transistors and energy to improve the average case but not the 99th-percentile case: no caches, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, multiprocessing, speculative prefetching, address coalescing, multithreading, context switching, and so forth. Minimalism is a virtue of domain-specific processors.

Table of Contents for Advantages of TPUs

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Table of Contents for
Advantages of TPUs