9 comments

  • pcmoritz 21 minutes ago
    For people interested in this: I've been working on an open-source libtpu implementation for https://tenstorrent.com/ accelerators as a side project, it can already run most of torchtpu, see https://github.com/pcmoritz/libtt (based on the tenstorrent software stack). It shows all the things involved in lowering torch to tile based accelerators.
  • npalli 1 hour ago
    Interesting, Amazon doing the same for AWS Trainium.

    https://github.com/aws-neuron/torch-neuronx

  • fancyfredbot 18 minutes ago
    Cool! XLA is pretty good + potentially a better compiler infrastructure than inductor which will lead to improved performance on all hardware.

    Also I guess this is the final nail in the coffin of Tensorflow.

  • yipinwong 1 hour ago
    Dumb question from non-AI engineer.

    Is this somehow Google's answer to today's best DeepSeek open-sourcing inferencing engine?

    • bitpush 1 hour ago
      I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.
    • JacobAsmuth 42 minutes ago
      Yeah they read the news this morning and whipped up a quick Torch->XLA translation layer and coordinated with four different inference engines (who also all wrote their own blog posts) and shoved this out the door quick to stay on top of the news cycle
      • parthdesai 29 minutes ago
        Why be rude on purpose? OP clearly prefaced by saying it was a dumb question
        • caaqil 0 minutes ago
          Welcome to the internet, great to have you here.
      • mathisfun123 40 minutes ago
        they're releasing this today because the pytorch conf is this week...
    • geremiiah 16 minutes ago
      No, these are two very different objectives.
    • Tanjreeve 1 hour ago
      They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.
      • beardedetim 18 minutes ago
        Yeah I'd assume this is to allow us to train on their TPUs with torch instead of needing to rent a GPU
    • mathisfun123 53 minutes ago
      lol no this is a replacement for https://github.com/pytorch/xla
  • nelaggy 50 minutes ago
    so if the moat isn't the model and the moat isn't the inference layer, i guess the moat is the hardware now? what does this mean for frontier labs?
    • badrequest 30 minutes ago
      hardware has always been the moat in the AI space
    • JacobAsmuth 43 minutes ago
      Products can also be a moat.
  • Lucasoato 1 hour ago
    Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud?
    • boulos 1 hour ago
      Yes. Google is famously selling TPUs on prem to big customers (e.g., Anthropic) and Crux AI is now a venture to do just that.
    • goda90 45 minutes ago
      Maybe just marketing, but they call the NPUs in their Pixel phones "TPUs"
    • sschueller 1 hour ago
      Google coral USB and m.2 devices are TPUs.
      • Archit3ch 13 minutes ago
        "Have you seen any software run on Coral TPUs?"

        "No, but I have seen the house that the project built, and it is terrific." ~ some Google director

      • boulos 1 hour ago
        Only in marketing name. They're not related otherwise.
    • westurner 1 hour ago
      TPU / neural compute accelerator / Math coprocessor;

      "OpenTPU: Open-Source Reimplementation of Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452

      From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848676 :

      > How does Cerebras WSE-3 with 44GB of 'L2' on-chip SRAM compare to Google's TPUs, Tesla's TPUs, NorthPole, Groq LPU, Tenstorrent's, and AMD's NPU designs?

      There are TPUs made out of silicon carbide with standard fab.

      There is in-flight tensor processing with photons, but that's not quite a TPU.

      • hackernudes 41 minutes ago
        I think the commenter was asking if Google sells TPU chip hardware to use outside of Google's own infrastructure and cloud.
  • 23agt 1 hour ago
    Google is selling TPU shovels via Cloud services and also physically to select partners. So this makes sense.

    There will be an abundance of shovels. Nebius already crashed by almost half from its hype peak.

    • airza 1 hour ago
      it doesn't seem like there's an abundance of shovels coming anytime soon
  • Androcles 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • karansuthar 48 minutes ago
    [dead]