Please note that as I increase the batch size the clock frequency goes up batches finish faster (obviously). import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.datasets import mnist from tensorflow.keras.utils import to_categorical from tensorflow.keras import layers from tensorflow.keras import models model = models.Sequential() model.add(layers.Conv2D(32, (3, 3), activation='relu', input_shape=(28, 28, 1))) model.add(layers.MaxPooling2D((2, 2))) model.add(layers.Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation='relu')) model.add(layers.MaxPooling2D((2, 2))) model.add(layers.Conv2D(64, (3, 3), activation='relu')) model.add(layers.Flatten()) model.add(layers.Dense(64, activation='relu')) model.add(layers.Dense(10, activation='softmax')) (train_images, train_labels), (test_images, test_labels) = mnist.load_data() train_images = train_images.reshape((60000, 28, 28, 1)) train_images = train_images.astype('float32') / 255 test_images = test_images.reshape((10000, 28, 28, 1)) test_images = test_images.astype('float32') / 255 train_labels = to_categorical(train_labels) test_labels = to_categorical(test_labels) model.compile(optimizer='rmsprop', loss='categorical_crossentropy', metrics=['accuracy']) model.fit(train_images, train_labels, epochs=5, batch_size=32) test_loss, test_acc = model.evaluate(test_images, test_labels) test_acc