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.
TPUs are not fundamentally different or more efficient than NVIDIA hardware. They are just cutting out the middleman.
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."
Asic for matmul is systolic array more or less