It’s been really interesting to see what one of my investments, Groq, has been up to over the past few months.
In August, Groq, the inventor of the Tensor Streaming
Processor (TSP) chip, closed its funding round which meant that it could use
such investment to pursue exciting, novel projects in a range of sectors. All
of its existing strategic investors chose to participate in this latest funding
round which was led by new investor D1 Capital Partners. Alongside this, new,
strategic investors also joined such as TDK Ventures.
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| Groq's TSP chip leading the way |
Dan Sundheim, founder and chief investment officer of D1
Capital Partners commented, “We are excited to invest in an exceptional
management team that is leading the development of ground-breaking
technology…we believe that Groq’s scalable technology will allow for highly
efficient and powerful processing capabilities that can revolutionize the
industry.”
More recently in September, Groq announced that it has begun
shipping its latest Groq card, node and Groq ware SDK solutions to customers
worldwide. This technology is having a significant impact on the industry,
offering up new, more efficient products to the market. The Groq node is a high
performance and low power device which offers unprecedented TCO (Total Cost of
Ownership) benefits. Also, the latest release of the Groq ware SDK has meant
that developers are able to build high-performance models on Groq cards and
nodes.
Groq continues to ship its PCIe card featuring its TSP chip,
adding industry standard server management capabilities. Its unique TSP is
capable of 18,900 IPS (inferences per second) on ResNet-50 v2 at batch size
one. This makes it the fastest commercially available AI/ML accelerator, with a
responsiveness measured in hundredths of a millisecond. This eliminates the
typical trade-off between performance and latency. This alone exemplifies the
uniqueness of Groq’s architecture.
Andrew Fursman, Co-Founder and CEO at computer software firm
1QBit said, “1QBit is pushing further into AI, and the bottlenecks we are
running into are almost all of a computational nature. That’s where Groq‘s
solutions and architecture have helped us tremendously. We look forward to
working further with Groq and are excited to see them expand their customer
base in the healthcare, life sciences, and financial markets.”
What I find most exciting is seeing Groq’s current
developments come to fruition, as the company is working with numerous global
customers in the autonomous vehicle and financial spaces. This is in addition
to collaboration with a number of national labs, who are using its technology
to address a wide variety of large compute challenges.
