Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs
github.com170 points by ilreb 4 hours ago
170 points by ilreb 4 hours ago
Google and Apple are going to move consumers and ordinary business users to edge inference. This is more disruptive to the upcoming IPOs than most investors understand.
For people interested in this: I've been working on an open-source libtpu implementation for https://tenstorrent.com/ accelerators as a side project, it can already run most of torchtpu, see https://github.com/pcmoritz/libtt (based on the tenstorrent software stack). It shows all the things involved in lowering torch to tile based accelerators.
Very cool! I have been using Lean to drive PJRT like so: https://github.com/brettkoonce/lean4-mlir and in theory your code could unlock another platform!
Thanks for sharing, this is super cool! Right now my approach to correctness it to just run as many tests as possible and fix them (torchtpu greatly expands the amount of available tests), but formal verification is also super cool. Having a look at your book https://lean.brettkoonce.com/blueprint.pdf
The Tenstorrent ISA is documented btw https://github.com/tenstorrent/tt-isa-documentation, I wonder if one could do the verification end-to-end with the hardware.
This is super cool!
Thanks for the encouragement, if you have the hardware and end up trying it out I'd love to get your feedback (feel free to drop an issue in the repo) :)
I would love to do that, but unfortunately don’t have one on hand (yet?). In fact, I’m curious - did you buy a TT device to work on this, or are you using a cloud provider like Koyeb?
I first built my own to try it out (the exact hardware is described in https://relativity.cc/hardware/ under "one Blackhole card") and when I liked the hardware I got a quietbox 2. It is very high quality but a little expensive (but inexpensive compared to other LLM hardware and it has excellent interconnects which is very rare in the consumer/dev space).
Interesting, Amazon doing the same for AWS Trainium.
Pytorch conference is happening today for explaining the coincidental timing
That explains the 5x speed increases huggingface mentioned for Mac using metal.
Pardon my ignorance, but who else besides Google has TPUs? Are they commercially available somewhere? What’s their main application right now outside of Google?
You can rent them on cloud + they sell directly to Anthropic. Its pretty well known that Anthropic is a heavy user of TPU's (along with Trainium & GPU's)
Cool! XLA is pretty good + potentially a better compiler infrastructure than inductor which will lead to improved performance on all hardware.
Also I guess this is the final nail in the coffin of Tensorflow.
Amazing news, I remember the days when you had to fight XLA to make PyTorch run on TPUs, it seems we finally got first-party support!
Since HW specifics live mostly in the kernel layer (Pallas or CUDA), I imagine the Jax vs PyTorch question is more of a style preference now?
Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud?
Yes. Google is famously selling TPUs on prem to big customers (e.g., Anthropic) and Crux AI is now a venture to do just that.
Google coral USB and m.2 devices are TPUs.
"Have you seen any software run on Coral TPUs?"
"No, but I have seen the house that the project built, and it is terrific." ~ some Google director
TPU / neural compute accelerator / Math coprocessor;
"OpenTPU: Open-Source Reimplementation of Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848676 :
> How does Cerebras WSE-3 with 44GB of 'L2' on-chip SRAM compare to Google's TPUs, Tesla's TPUs, NorthPole, Groq LPU, Tenstorrent's, and AMD's NPU designs?
There are TPUs made out of silicon carbide with standard fab.
There is in-flight tensor processing with photons, but that's not quite a TPU.
I think the commenter was asking if Google sells TPU chip hardware to use outside of Google's own infrastructure and cloud.
Google is selling TPU shovels via Cloud services and also physically to select partners. So this makes sense.
There will be an abundance of shovels. Nebius already crashed by almost half from its hype peak.
Is the Linux driver available?
Dumb question from non-AI engineer.
Is this somehow Google's answer to today's best DeepSeek open-sourcing inferencing engine?
I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.
Yeah they read the news this morning and whipped up a quick Torch->XLA translation layer and coordinated with four different inference engines (who also all wrote their own blog posts) and shoved this out the door quick to stay on top of the news cycle
Why be rude on purpose? OP clearly prefaced by saying it was a dumb question
They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.
Yeah I'd assume this is to allow us to train on their TPUs with torch instead of needing to rent a GPU
so if the moat isn't the model and the moat isn't the inference layer, i guess the moat is the hardware now? what does this mean for frontier labs?
hardware has always been the moat in the AI space
Yeah a lot of people bought into the idea of CUDA being a moat but we’re well past the point where it’s pretty trivial to jump to another equivalent stack on the software side.
Those are the two main interfaces: the inference hardware and the endpoints. Endpoints are pretty much standardized to the point that you can switch them out in seconds. CUDA still has an edge but every release like this chips away at that. Even so, TPUs are unobtanium so while I appreciate Google's effort here I also recognize that it is not something that will be useful to me.
In that sense AMD is still better positioned to give NVidia a run for their money but given the family connection and AMD's underdog status I am not very hopeful that we'll see meaningful competition in inference hardware any time soon.
NVidia is a much harder nut to crack than OpenAI or Anthropic. They are easily a decade ahead of viable competition. Check out the GB300 if you don't believe that.
Even if it's allegedly possible, the devil has always been in the details. It always sucks to find out that there's some quirk of your model architecture that breaks an implicit assumption that underpins the export process.
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