Tiny-TPU is a custom accelerator that re-invents Google's TPU logic by scaling down the original 256x256 systolic array to a 2x2 grid.
The team adopted a strict philosophy to ALWAYS TRY THE HACKY WAY before consulting external sources.
The project explicitly aims to code without relying on AI to write for us.
tinytpu.com2025-08-18134 HN pts · 24 comments5.7k words
Where it's used
Hugging Face does not say who downloads a model or with what. These are the proxies: API providers listing it, quantized builds, fine-tunes/adapters/merges, and Spaces that load it.
No API provider serves it, so its downloads are people running it themselves: 7 Spaces.
Weights only, an estimate: leave room for the KV cache. Method
Fits a 64 GB Mac (unified memory) at INT4
About 21 GB at INT4, 42 GB at FP8, 84 GB at BF16: weights only, so leave room for the KV cache. Every expert must be resident, so total parameters count.
Weights, every dated article, and repo commits on one rail.
1 dated article and 23 repo commits so far
Teal is the weights (2026-09-21), amber triangles are 1 dated article (each links to it), grey ticks are repo commits.
Reference
Everything else, folded: the full tables, every source.
Benchmarks
11 rows
Benchmarks 11 rows
measured third-party leaderboard rowauthor-reported number from the model card or eval files (11)No confidence intervals unless the source gave them; settings differ between rows, so compare within a benchmark, not across. Date = the benchmark's own date when it gives one, else when we read it.
Labels are evidence, not verdicts: measured a third-party leaderboard row for this model; author-reported a number the model author published in the card or eval files; structural a deterministic signal from the name, config or chat template, or a decision-model estimate. Each chip links to its source. All use cases.
Ranked by source signals (HN, Lobsters, authority domains, official posts) and recency. Summaries are generated from a stored copy of the article text; every sentence cites a span of that text, and nothing is shown that failed the citation check.
tinytpu.com2025-08-18HN front pageHN 134 pts · 24 comments5,690 words
Tiny-TPU is a custom accelerator that re-invents Google's TPU logic by scaling down the original 256x256 systolic array to a 2x2 grid. The design uses Processing Elements (PE) connected in a grid-like structure where each PE performs a multiply-accumulate operation. Data flows through these elements to calculate matrix multiplications that dominate 80-90% of the compute operations in transformers.written, reviewed, cited
The team adopted a strict philosophy to ALWAYS TRY THE HACKY WAY before consulting external sources.
The project explicitly aims to code without relying on AI to write for us.