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Comment by slizard | Hacker News Reader

It's a pity they omitted comparing against the Maxwell-gen GPUs like the M40/M4. Those were out already in late 2015 and are also on 28 nm.

Perhaps the reason is simply that they don't have them in their servers, but we'll see if Jeff Dean replies on G+ [1].

[1] https://plus.google.com/+JeffDean/posts/4n3rBF5utFQ?cfem=1

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Not really, it's not such a pity. It's not for us, mere mortals, unless you have billions of predictions to make and megawatts power to save. For your personal project where you make a few predictions per day you can use a GPU or even a CPU.

TPU excited me too at first, but when I realized that it is not related to training new networks (research) and is useful only for large scale deployment, I toned down my enthusiasm a little.

Neither Google Cloud nor Amazon Web Services offers Maxwell-series GPUs. Both jumped, or, to be more precise, are in the process of jumping, from the K-series to the P100 series.

When I google around a bit, I see several results talking about the software licensing cost model for the M-series GPUs.

There are no datacenter class Maxwell-series GPUs. They never released a version with ECC SRAM and so Amazon and Google never used them in production.

Part of the fault was GDDR5's limitations that involved trickery to make the Kepler-series work.

Pascal is coming with ECC because HBM2 comes with ECC built-in.

Several cloud providers have been offering P100 GPUs for a while now: https://www.nimbix.net/nimbix-cloud-demand-pricing/

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