
Using TensorFlow in Windows with a GPU - rcarmo
http://www.heatonresearch.com/2017/01/01/tensorflow-windows-gpu.html
======
kuschku
I’d be far more interested in seeing TensorFlow work on AMD GPUs or standard
FPGAs.

Nvidia GPUs, with a profit margin in the double digits, aren’t very cost-
effective for such a task. Especially when you’re a student.

For the paper I’m currently writing I ended up running the models CPU-based
for months, as I couldn’t afford the cost to get a good Nvidia GPU, and as my
university couldn’t provide me with compute time (as they have many thousands
more students than servers available).

~~~
NegatioN
I agree with your sentiment completely, it would be a win/win to be able to
use TF and other similar frameworks on AMD hardware. But I would also like to
point out that using online compute power for this should be possible even at
a student budget (assuming you're in the west).

Amazon and Google have good options for those who can't afford dishing out
$650x4 for a decent ML setup.

~~~
Dzugaru
Online computing power is not the same as your own - it's like taxi vs your
own car. You can't do what you want when you want. Turned on your Amazon
machine? No sleep till you fix the bugs and load all GPUs :) Every "downtime"
costs. I, personally, find it very disturbing and despite the fact my employer
pays for my Amazon time I often prefer my laptop with GeForce 840M :)

~~~
gtani
Agreed, as well as the evolving nontrivial hunt for cost reductions e.g. "Just
use spot instances in US west 1 on weekends", stuff like that.

A pascal GPU and older CPU that takes at least 32GB RAM is a decent
combination. I'm looking to upgrade to an older Xeon and a 1080 (price should
be dropping any week now...) or 1080 Ti. Even the Sandy/ivy bridge i7's have
not too bad results on most benchmarks:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-
review-6700...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-
review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9)

------
tempw
DISCLAIMER: TensorFlow on Windows require strictly Python 3.5 64-bit and never
was how the author states

> As of the writing of this post, TensorFlow requires Python 2.7, 3.4 or 3.5

------
westoncb
Anyone know what the process in TensorFlow is like for taking your trained
network and bringing it into another application (or whether this is even
possible)? Just wondering whether it's easy/difficult/(in)flexible or
whatever.

Edit: to clarify: by 'another application' I mean something else you're making
that it serves as an algorithm within (e.g. a handwriting recognizing Android
app).

~~~
pilooch
It varies :) Mores especially it depends on your final platform and
programming language. Android is fine, pure C++ without Python is more
difficult though doable (eg deepdetect server has support for it), many other
wrappers exist around TF.

------
vonnik
Deeplearning4j had done this for a long time. Tensorflow has been slow to
serve Windows.

