Ten Lessons From Three Generations Shaped Google’s TPUv4i : Industrial Product

Google deployed several TPU generations since 2015, teaching us lessons that changed our views: semi-conductor technology advances unequally; compiler compatibility trumps binary compatibility, especially for VLIW domain-specific architectures (DSA); target total cost of ownership vs initial cost; support multi-tenancy; deep neural networks (DNN) grow 1.5X annually; DNN advances evolve workloads; some inference tasks require floating point; inference DSAs need air-cooling; apps limit latency, not batch size; and backwards ML compatibility helps deploy DNNs quickly. These lessons molded TPUv4i, an inference DSA deployed since 2020.