What are the minimum system requirements for executing a simple project in Tensorflow? [closed]

Question

I've been wanting to try out Tensorflow but I don't know if my system has enough hardware requirements for it.

My system specifications are
• Intel i3 processor
• 4 GB RAM
• 1TB hard disk
• Nvidia 210 GPU

Is this configuration enough to run a simple AI project like image recognition? I've searched the website and other resources but no where is there any details about system requirements.

Answer 1

UPDATE 2020-01-17 : Try out free online GPU instances. For example colab.research.google.com is one such site and kaggle.com is another! No GPU or local install needed!

I agree with @mad-wombat, there are no minimum requirements to use a CPU for tensorflow.

You said that you are interested in image recognition. With your hardware you could run the MNIST for beginners or the advanced MNIST examples.

Try it out! Tensorflow.org even suggests starting with CPU-only when you first try.

When you become more ambitious and want to do larger projects you'll need to take into consideration how much data you are trying to put into memory. If you are using a CPU or GPU then you'll care about RAM or GPU Memory (respectively), but it certainly isn't a roadblock to starting. Additionally, many people just tune the amount of data stored in memory by doing some of the following :

• store fewer training examples in memory at one time. Many online examples (like MNIST) start by loading all images into memory first, then iterating on them. This just isn't possible with very large data sets no matter the hardware size. The solution is to stream the data through the network.
• use smaller minibatch sizes. Of course I recommend using minibatch sizes of 10 to 100, but depending on your image size and number of hyper parameters, you may have to tune this to something lower, but you'll only find that through some trial and error. In the beginning, I wouldn't worry about it.

But you don't have to worry about this when you are starting! - Just install Tensorflow, walk through the tutorials, and get a feel for it. All the tutorials work just fine on GPU!

I do most of my initial testing and coding on a CPU only machine with limited RAM and it works just great.

Good Luck!