Benchmarking Google’s new TPUv2
[Edited] The top line results focus on comparing four TPUs in a rack node (which marketing cleverly named “one cloud TPU”), running ~16 bit mixed precision, to one GPU (out of 8 in a rack node), also capable of 16 bit or mixed precision, but handicapped to 32 bit IEEE 754. That is a misleading comparison. Images&#x2F;$ are obviously more directly comparable, but again the emphasized comparisons are at different precision. Very different batch sizes make this significantly more misleading, still. Images&#x2F;$ also only tells us that Google has chosen to look at the competition and set a competitive price; the per-die or per-package comparison is much more relevant to understand any intrinsic architectural advantage, since these are all large dies on roughly comparable process nodes.