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H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 15, 2017 07:52 PM UTC:

Well, the 64-cores (or was it in reality 32 cores, with hyper threading?) setup used for Stockfish in the match was a bit more powerful that the 'typical PC', which nowadays is only 4 cores.

Note that the TPUs are not really more powerful than top-of-the-line CPU chips, in terms of number of transitors, or power consumption. It is just that they do completely different things Things useful for running AlphaZero. If AlphaZero would have to run on an ordiary CPU, it would be orders of magnitude slower. OTOH, if Stockfish would have had to run o a TPU, it probably would not be able to run at all.

But as applications using eural nets get more common, it is conceivable that future PCs will have a built-i TPU as a standard feature. There has been a time that floatig point calculations were considered such a difficult and specialized task that you needed a separate co-processor chip for them (the 8087) next to the CPU (he 8086). From the 80486 on, the floating-point uit was included in the CPU chip. TPUs might go the same way: first available on a plug-in card about as expensive as your motherboard (+ components), such as powerful video cards for gaming now, then as a  add-on feature on the motherboard itself, where you just plug in the optional chip, and then integrated on the chip itself. There is a limit to the usefuless of ever more cores for the average PC user; having more than two cores is already a dubious asset for most people. Having 2 cores plus a TPU would probably be much better, when neural networks will get more commoly used in software.


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