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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

If I'm invested in NVDA should I sell? Is this is a real competitor that will remove NVDA's AI leadership?

Until you can buy a TPU card for your workstation, at a competitive price, there's no real competitor. And even then, it's just for TensorFlow.

Last I heard theyre creating their own custom chip as well.

nvidia's not going to suddenly collapse because of this, but a lot of the froth in that company is due to their existence as pretty much the ONLY provider of DL accelerators. They had no competition and there were no competitors in sight, it looked like they were going to dominate the space in the short term. This changes now I think. The 2nd Gen TPU is competitive even if not strictly better. In a few years instead of nvidia being a clear leader it may just be one of a pack, and that's bad for the current valuation.

No, it's great news for NVidia.

Nvidia is the only current credible provider of DL hardware. If Google starts using TPUs then every other company will be forced to buy more Nvidia cards or they will be left behind.

Microsoft is the only exception here: they have some investment in a FPGA based ML solution. Even IBM uses NVidia as their DL solution on Power servers.

I know of one startup working on a TPU killer and there must be others. Amazon is probably either already working on a deep learning ASIC or scouting startups to buy. Apple is probably poaching people from Google/Nvidia to build their deep learning core.

Nvidia is the TPU killer. V100: 120 TFLOPs, TPU: 45 TFLOPs.

There's at least one person on HN working on DL hardware.

That's what nervana was doing, and they were acquired by Intel.

Working on an TPU killer is nothing close to having hardware available at mass production volumes right now.

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