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epolanskiyesterday at 8:11 PM1 replyview on HN

Catch-up in what exactly? Google isn't building hardware to sell, they aren't in the same market.

Also I feel you completely misunderstand that the problem isn't how fast is ONE gpu vs ONE tpu, what matters is the costs for the same output. If I can fill a datacenter at half the cost for the same output, does it matters I've used twice the TPUs and that a single Nvidia Blackwell was faster? No...

And hardware cost isn't even the biggest problem, operational costs, mostly power and cooling are another huge one.

So if you design a solution that fits your stack (designed for it) and optimize for your operational costs you're light years ahead of your competition using the more powerful solution, that costs 5 times more in hardware and twice in operational costs.

All I say is more or less true for inference economics, have no clue about training.


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butvacuumyesterday at 8:37 PM

Also, isn't memory a bit moot? At scale I thought that the ASICs frequently sat idle waiting for memory.

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