AI Hardware Built from a Software-first Perspective: Groq's Flexible Silicon Architecture - News

Semiconductor industry startups are usually founded by hardware engineers who develop a silicon architecture and then figure out how to map software for that specific hardware. Here is a tale of a chip startup founded in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) that has a software DNA. Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of software engineers who wanted to solve AI problems from the software side. When they approached the issue without any preconceptions of what an AI architecture may need to look like, they were able to create an architecture that can be mapped to different AI models. The company is focused on the inference market for data centers and autonomous vehicles, and its first product is a PCIe plug-in card for which Groq designed the ASIC and AI accelerator and developed the software stack.