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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud?

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.

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.

I think the commenter was asking if Google sells TPU chip hardware to use outside of Google's own infrastructure and cloud.

Google coral USB and m.2 devices are TPUs.

"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

https://frigate.video

Is a pretty successful open source NVR that used corals when it launched (and many people still use them with it)

Yeah I have one for Frigate on a Raspberry Pi. Has worked well but definitely showing its age performance wise. I got a cheap mini PC (right before prices like quadrupled) which has about the same performance on an iGPU). I wouldn't be surprised if Frigate was the funnel for like 90% of Coral purchases or more.

Only in marketing name. They're not related otherwise.

Maybe just marketing, but they call the NPUs in their Pixel phones "TPUs"

TPUs are really matrix processors (they process 2d tensors right?), it's technically fair to call most matrix processors TPUs.

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