alt Hacker NewsThere does come a point where if you're in the follow up article discussing what's new in 2 new variants of the 8th generation of a niche product for that vendor it stops being reasonable from them explaining what everything means each time and starts being reasonable to either click the links to the earlier introduction or search around for it to get a proper understanding as if you didn't know "TPU" was "Tensor Processing Unit" then there is a lot more you want to know before reading this article.
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I see your point, but it's good practice to introduce abbreviations at least once before using them. I even still see GPU defined at least once in most professionally written articles.
Is it going to kill them to spell it out once?
Also, it doesn't just come out and say what the peak throughput of these chips are, just 2.7x the prior generation. This is one of those things that Apple does every Mac release--it's always some big dumb bar that is bigger or some line up and to the right that has absolutely no explanation.
It is good writing practice, even in technical documents, to spell out an acronym the first time it is used in your document.
> We first designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) more than a decade ago motivated by Google’s...
Literally all it takes. Basically free and it helps both broaden your audience and avoid mistakes. Also, high key, it is a great opportunity for a back link to https://cloud.google.com/tpu, which you'd think Google would care about.
I disagree. I think you're saying that because this is your niche and finding the term isn't difficult for you.
However, consider the Tolkien community. I enjoy lord of the rings and want to know more. But there's an absurd acronym for another book (home) that no one ever expands in that community. And it's not in the wiki's and it's not in Google (bc what do you get if you google "tolkien home"?) it was intentionally frustrating for me to figure out what that acronym was. The people in the tolkien community also adopted your pov and just wouldn't help, expecting new people to bootstrap themselves. It was not a fun experience. These styling conventions aren't for the 99% of the time they're for the 1% of the time.