Groq GroqChip 1

The GroqChip 1 is the first Tensor Streaming Processor, announced in November 2019 and sold from 2022 as the GroqCard accelerator. It is a 25 by 29 millimetre 14nm die of 26.8 billion transistors running at a fixed 900 MHz, rated at 750 TOPS of INT8 and 188 TFLOPS of FP16, and it has no external memory at all: 230 MB of globally shared SRAM at up to 80 TB/s is the entire memory system. Everything about it follows from that. There is no cache, no branch prediction and no hardware scheduler, so the compiler places every instruction on a known cycle and the same program takes exactly the same time on every run, which is what Groq sells rather than peak arithmetic. A model larger than 230 MB has to be split across chips, so the die spends its perimeter on sixteen RealScale links that connect cards directly without a switch. Against a GPU of the same era the memory is three orders of magnitude smaller and the latency is the product. This is first-generation Groq silicon and not the NVIDIA-branded Groq 3 LPU, which is three generations and one acquisition later.