Sweet, thanks! It seems like this research ecosystem was incredibly rich, but Moore's law was in full swing, and statically known workloads weren't useful at the compute scale of back then.
So these specialized approach never stood a chance next to CPUS. Nowadays the ground is.. more fertile.
1) If you took 3 years longer to build a SIMD architecture than Intel to make a CPU, Intel would be 4x faster by the time you shipped.
2) If, as a customer, I was to code to your architecture, and it took me 3 more years to do that, by that point, Intel would be 16x faster
And any edge would be lost. The world was really fast-paced. Groq was founded in 2016. It's 2024. If it was still hayday of Moore's Law, you'd be competing with CPUs running 40x as fast as today's.
I'm not sure you'd be so competitive against a 160GHz processor, and I'm not sure I'd be interested knowing a 300+GHz was just around the corner.
Good ideas -- lots of them -- lived in academia, where people could prototype neat architectures on ancient processes, and benchmark themselves to CPUs of yesteryear from those processes.
So these specialized approach never stood a chance next to CPUS. Nowadays the ground is.. more fertile.
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