HOW GOOGLE'S NEW A.I. MICROCHIPS TAKE A PAGE FROM BITCOIN MINERS

Yesterday at Google’s I/O developers conference, CEO Sundar Pichai briefly spoke about a custom-built chip that helps give Google its edge in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The chip, dubbed a TPU or Tensor Processing Unit (in keeping with Google's A.I. platform TensorFlow), is specifically wrought for running Google’s decision-making algorithms. Mostcompanies like Facebook and Microsoft use GPUs for their machine learning and artificial intelligence.But Pichai’s speech and the accompanying blog post only reveal a few details about TPUs. About the only useful thing we know about the chip is that it’s an ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit. ASIC chips aren’t bought off the shelves, but designed specifically to do one task very well without using a lot of power. They’re used in applications that never change, like the controlling how a phone battery charges. .............................. [read full story]