Context: Google recently launched a new computer chip, called Ironwood. It is the company’s seventh-generation TPU, or tensor processing unit, which has been designed to run artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Meaning of the context: Processing units are essentially hardware units that are the brain of a computer. In this context, it is important to understand the difference between CPU, GPU and TPU.

Learning zone:

About CPU (Central Processing Unit)

• Developed in the 1950s, a CPU is a general-purpose processor that can handle various tasks.
• A CPU has at least a single core — the processing unit within the CPU that can execute instructions. In the initial years, CPUs used to have just one core but today, they can contain from two to up to 16 cores. As each core of the CPU can handle one task at a time, the ability to multitask is determined by the number of cores in the hardware.

About GPU (graphics processing unit)

• Unlike a CPU, a GPU is a specialised processor (it is a type of application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC) which has been designed to perform multiple tasks concurrently rather than sequentially (like in a CPU). 
• Modern GPUs comprise thousands of cores which break down complex problems into thousands or millions of separate tasks and work them out in parallel, a concept known as parallel processing. This makes GPUs far more efficient than CPUs.
• Initially developed for graphics rendering in gaming and animation, GPUs today are far more flexible and have become the bedrock of machine learning.

About TPU (Tensor Processing Unit)

• A TPU is also a type of ASIC, meaning it is designed to perform a narrow scope of intended tasks. First used by Google in 2015, TPUs were specially built to accelerate machine learning workloads.
• TPUs are engineered to handle tensor — a generic name for the data structures used for machine learning — operations. They excel in processing large volumes of data and executing complex neural networks efficiently, enabling fast training of AI models. 
• While AI models can take weeks to be trained with the help of GPUs, the same process can be executed within hours using TPUs.

Source : Indian Express