Comment by adastra22
7 hours ago
The fundamentals are different. Bitcoin mining is not intrinsically suited to acceleration on a GPU. It is a not-very-wide serial integer operation.
AI inference on the other hand is basically just very large floating point tensor matrix multiplication. What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A GPU.
Sorta? If that was the full story, TPU would not be a thing.
I'm not an expert in chip design by any means but I think it's fair to say that TPU is a marketing term and it's not substantially different from a GPU like an H100. H100's cores are also called "Tensor Cores."
TPUs are not fundamentally different or more efficient than NVIDIA hardware. They are just cutting out the middleman.
Asic for matmul is systolic array more or less