I’m back from the 44th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, and this is a perfect time for me to summarise my thoughts on the conference.
The conference was in Toronto, which was a refreshing change for me to see correct spelling and sensible units for a change. Beyond that, the conference had a lot of interesting developments, and some that were not quite as interesting.
First, let me address the 15-month elephant in the room. That’s Google’s Tensor processing unit (TPU) paper. I wasn’t impressed with the paper (although I am impressed by the engineering), although a lot of people seemed to be impressed by that paper. Indeed, only one other person I spoke with at the conference seemed to share my views on the matter. My criticism of the TPU paper is that it really gives little information. An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) will obviously have much less power/energy and much higher performance over a general purpose processor. The really interesting parts of the TPU would have been the Tensorflow-to-control-instructions compiler and driver. Unfortunately, these details still remain elusive. In fact, the whole paper describes (or fails to describe) technology that is over four years old and has already been replaced. In my opinion, I find more information in Google’s Project Zero blog than I did in the TPU paper and the associated talk.