Comment by frays

5 months ago

How can someone have this level of knowledge about TPUs without working at Google?

From the acknowledgment at the end, I guess the author has access to TPUs through https://sites.research.google/trc/about/

This is not the only way though. TPUs are available to companies operating on GCP as an alternative to GPUs with a different price/performance point. That is another way to get hands-on experience with TPUs.

There's a pretty detailed description of TPUs in the latest edition of Hennessy's Computer Architecture. (Hennessy was also involved with the design of the early TPU architectures if I recall right.)