Our latest TPU, Trillium, is now available in preview. Learn more about our latest TPU, Trillium, from a Google expert — as well as what

Ask a Techspert: What's the difference between a CPU, GPU and TPU?

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2024-10-30 21:30:06

Our latest TPU, Trillium, is now available in preview. Learn more about our latest TPU, Trillium, from a Google expert — as well as what a TPU, CPU and GPU are and what makes them all different.

Back at I/O in May, we announced Trillium, the sixth generation of our very own custom-designed chip known as the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU — and today, we announced that it’s now available to Google Cloud Customers in preview. TPUs are what power the AI that makes your Google devices and apps as helpful as possible, and Trillium is the most powerful and sustainable TPU yet.

But what exactly is a TPU? And what makes Trillium "custom"? To really understand what makes Trillium so special, it's important to learn not only about TPUs, but also other types of compute processors — CPUs and GPUs — as well as what makes them different. As a product manager who works on AI infrastructure at Google Cloud, Chelsie Czop knows exactly how to break it all down. “I work across multiple teams to make sure our platforms are as efficient as possible for our customers who are building AI products,” she says. And what makes a lot of Google’s AI products possible, Chelsie says, are Google’s TPUs.

These are all chips that work as processors for compute tasks. Think of your brain as a computer that can do things like reading a book or doing a math problem. Each of those activities is similar to a compute task. So if you use your phone to take a picture, send a text or open an application, your phone’s brain, or processor, is doing those compute tasks.

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