I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
In plain words
This is an open-source hardware design for a specialized machine learning chip capable of both inference and training, demonstrated on the XOR problem. Built by developers without professional hardware experience, it serves as an educational reference for anyone interested in understanding how ML accelerators work. The project stands out for its documented, from-first-principles approach to hardware design and its focus on simple, practical solutions over conventional methods.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we established a strict design philosophy: TO ALWAYS TRY THE HACKY WAY. This meant trying out the "dumb" ideas that came to our mind first BEFORE consulting external sources. This philosophy helped us make sure we weren't reverse engineering the TPU, but rather re-inventing it, which helped us derive many of the key mechanisms used in the TPU ourselves. We also wanted to treat this project as an exercise to code without relying on AI to write for us, since we felt that our initial instinct recently has been to reach for llms whenever we faced a slight struggle. We wanted to cultivate a certain style of thinking that we could take forward with us and use in any future endeavours to think through difficult problems. Throughout this project we tried to learn as much as we could about the fundamentals of deep learning, hardware design and creating algorithms and we found that the best way to learn about this stuff is by drawing everything out and making that our first instinct. In tinytpu.com, you will see how our explanations were inspired by this philosophy. Note that this is NOT a 1-to-1 replica of the TPU--it is our attempt at re-inventing a toy version of it ourselves.
Does the same job
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Open-source GTM skills for technical founders
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OpenTrailPaper is open-source bike computer firmware for the LilyGO T5S3 4.7" E-Paper PRO. It supports offline maps, GPX routes, FIT recording and Bluetooth sensors.
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Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
- IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
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Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IW
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
- TC
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca