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Comment by cheptsov | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s not misleading, but rather very clear that there are problems. v7 is compared to v5e. Also, notice that it’s not compared to competitors, and the price isn’t mentioned. Finally, I think the much bigger issue with TPU is the software and developer experience. Without improvements there, there’s close to zero chance that anyone besides a few companies will use TPU. It’s barely viable if the trend continues.

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> besides a few companies will use TPU. It’s barely viable if the trend continues

That doesn't matter much of those few companies are the biggest companies. Even with Nvidia majority of the revenue is being generated by a handful of hyperscalers.

>Without improvements there, there’s close to zero chance that anyone besides a few companies will use TPU. It’s barely viable if the trend continues.

I wonder whether Google sees this as a problem. In a way it just means more AI compute capacity for Google.

The reference to El Capitan, is a competitor.

Are you suggesting NVIDIA is not a competitor?

You said: "notice that it’s not compared to competitors"

The article says: "When scaled to 9,216 chips per pod for a total of 42.5 Exaflops, Ironwood supports more than 24x the compute power of the world’s largest supercomputer – El Capitan – which offers just 1.7 Exaflops per pod."

It is literally compared to a competitor.

I believe my original sentence was accurate. I was expecting the article to provide an objective comparison between TPUs and their main competitors. If you’re suggesting that El Capitan is the primary competitor, I’m not sure I agree, but I appreciate the perspective. Perhaps I was looking for other competitors, which is why I didn’t really pay attention to El Capitan.

Andrey, this is what I'm referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632709

Yea, makes sense

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