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why did they never sell their tensor chips as stand-alone components in competition to NVIDIA?



They sold (and continue to sell) TPUs under the Coral brand, and they're pretty popular for edge inference (e.g. Frigate).


https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Coral+tpu

interesting, these are raspberry toy processors, maybe they should have released 'real' ones.


They may often be used with small embedded computers, but 1 Coral TPU handily beats even a top-end CPU for the stuff Frigate needs it to do -- and it does it at minuscule power draw. Sure, it's inference-focused, and that means it has limitations: it sucks for e.g. speech models, too. But it's pretty great at what it does and gets used in real applications too. My guess is you saw the USB-C model, but they do M2, big cards with multiple M2 slots, and miniPCIe (popular in industrial applications) too.


'Toys' that work for the intended function makes them tools. Why blow money on hardware and power when a Coral will do the job well?


nobody would buy them without google substituting it. the chips are just not competetive.


maybe the economics of scale would have kicked in after some substitution?




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