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Google has lifted the lid off of an internal project to create custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for machine learning tasks. The result is what they are calling a "TPU":
[We] started a stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications. The result is called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC we built specifically for machine learning — and tailored for TensorFlow. We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore's Law). [...] TPU is an example of how fast we turn research into practice — from first tested silicon, the team
had them up and running applications at speed in our data centers within 22 days.
The processors are already being used to improve search and Street View, and were used to power AlphaGo during its matches against Go champion Lee Sedol. More details can be found at Next Platform, Tom's Hardware, and AnandTech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2016, @09:00PM
why don't the school just hire their own cooks (even poach the ones working for the catering company), order in their own ingredients (a school is big enough to negotiate discounts and would it really matter if the cash-and-carry down the road did a better deal so long as the end product was the same?), and do the same thing AND KEEP THAT PROFIT THEMSELVES.
The theory is that if it is outsourced then the school has the option to switch to another catering company, thus the catering company has an incentive to keep costs down. Thus despite the profit margin, they would still be cheaper than another catering company.
But too often what really happens is that the catering company "captures" the contract through things like institutional memory that would make a brand new catering company have higher costs or lower quality until it develops its own institutional memory. Also buddying up (aka "a good working relationship") with the school administrators responsible for managing the contracts, making them less ruthless about switching contracts.
In those cases the end result is typically that the private catering company shaves costs by short-changing the labor and keeps the lionshare of those savings for themselves. So the peons get fucked, the school is no better off but the owners of the catering company have vacation homes in ibiza.