On the eastern side of Oxfordshire are the Cotswolds, a pleasant hill range with a curious etymology: the hills of the goddess Cuda (maybe, see footnote). Cuda is a powerful yet wrathful goddess, and to be in her good side it does feel like druidry. The first druidic test is getting software to work: the wild magic makes the rules of this test change continually. Therefore, I am writing a summary of what works as of Late 2023.
I recently became curious about TPUs, a specialised hardware for training Machine- and Deep-Learning models, where TPU stands for Tensor Processing Unit. This fancy chip can provide very high gains for anyone aiming to perform really massive parallelisation of AI tasks such as training, fine-tuning, and inference.
In this blog post, I will touch on what a TPU is, why it could be useful for AI applications when compared to GPUs and briefly discuss associated opportunity costs.