I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem

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

An attempt to understand and build a TPU—by complete novices.

Nobody really understands how TPUs work…and neither do we! So we wanted to make this because we wanted to take a shot and try to guess how it works–from the perspective of complete novices! This slideshow depicts the forward pass and backward pass on our toy accelerator. 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 TPU specifically is fairly simple: 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…from tinytpu.com

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…

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