**Background** - **Founded:** 2016 - **Headquarters:** Mountain View, California - **Origin:** Many key members of Groq were formerly involved in Google's TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) project. This heritage gives them deep expertise in designing chips for AI workloads. **The Groq Approach** - **Focus:** Groq isn't focused on building a traditional LPU. Their core technology is called the Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP). The TSP is optimized for transformer-based models, the core of many language models, and emphasizes determinism, high memory bandwidth, and efficiency. - **Performance over Flexibility:** Groq TSPs sacrifice some versatility that GPUs offer, but in return, gain tremendous performance and power efficiency gains in their targeted domain of transformer-based AI models. - **Software is Key:** Groq's software stack is critical. It ensures the smooth mapping of AI workloads to their unique chip architecture, maximizing the hardware's potential. **Key Points about Groq** - **Performance:** Groq chips demonstrate very competitive performance in terms of speed and energy consumption when tackling large language models and other relevant AI workloads. - **Customers:** While Groq is secretive about some of their clients, they are known to work with government agencies and large tech companies on cutting-edge AI projects. - **Competition:** Groq is facing competition from other LPU makers like Graphcore and Cerebras, as well as established players like NVIDIA continuously improving their GPU offerings for AI. **Why Groq Matters** - **AI Acceleration:** Groq is at the forefront of designing processors specifically tailored to the rapidly growing demands of language-based AI. - **Efficiency:** Their chips demonstrate that specialization can lead to massive improvements in power efficiency, a crucial factor as AI models become larger and more complex. - **Potential Disruptor:** Groq could significantly shake up the AI hardware landscape if they continue to deliver improvements in performance and efficiency at the current pace. **Where to Learn More** - **Groq Website:** Their website is purposefully sparse on details, but offers some insight ([https://groq.com](https://groq.com/)). - **Analysis/Interviews:** Search for interviews with Jonathan Ross, Groq's founder, for interesting analysis and perspectives on their approach. # References ```dataview Table title as Title, authors as Authors where contains(subject, "Groq") sort modified desc, authors, title ```