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According to the post, it’s only 2x cheaper. So for the same dollars spent, I would cut my time from 48 hours to 24.

But, TPUs are not standard, can’t be used for any other usecase. So those savings might not actually be realizable when everything is taken into account.

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That is not what the blog is saying. The blog post does not consider cost - it simply shows that a TPU v3 Pod is twice as fast as the largest DGX-2h cluster.

Why would you use cloud if you do a lot of training? Quad 2080Ti systems cost ~$7k + electricity. Assuming two such systems are equivalent in speed to 1 TPUv3 (4 chips), owning them would be more cost efficient after 4-5 months of training (depending on your electricity costs).

TPUs do have the memory capacity advantage though (over 2080Ti).

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