Google Forays Into Edge Computing With Cloud IoT Edge And TPU
Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an application specific integrated circuit, designed by Google for accelerating machine learning workloads, is going to be available at the edge. These tailor-made chips complement Cloud TPUs by inferencing machine learning models deployed at the edge. Google has also announced Cloud IoT Edge, an edge computing platform that extends Google Cloud’s data processing and machine learning to edge devices.
Google is the latest entrant into the edge computing market. The key competitors of Google Cloud – Amazon and Microsoft – have a comprehensive edge computing strategy. Amazon extended its IoT platform through AWS Greengrass while Microsoft recently made Azure IoT Edge generally available. The announcement of Edge TPU and Cloud IoT Edge marks the official entry of Google into the niche edge computing market.
A couple of years ago Google announced that it is adding TPUs to its cloud platform to accelerate machine learning workloads. Cloud TPUs deliver the computational power needed to train complex machine learning models based on deep neural networks. Currently, in V2, Cloud TPUs can deliver 180 teraflops of performance with 64 GB High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Customers using Google Cloud Platform can connect to Cloud TPUs from custom VM types to balance processor speeds, memory, and high-performance storage resources for running compute-intensive workloads.
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Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Director @ Tech Equity an Authorized Google Cloud Partner | Enabling Cloud Professionals @ ROI Training a Google Cloud Authorized Training Partner | Ex IBM & Vodafone | Startup Mentor & Coach
6 年Indeed. It was interesting to see how small the edge computing TPUs were, although IBM's smallest computer with a size of a fancy salt blew my mind away. It is indeed an interesting time.