Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/31/groq_nvidia_analysis/

22 points · 6 comments · view on lemmy.world

6 Comments

kindred@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 17 pts · 228d (1 reply)

El Reg speculates about what GPUzilla really gets out of the deal

The subtitle does not give confidence that the author knows wtf they're talking about.

Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social · 9 pts · 228d

To be fair, I think it's to be expected that this speculation on their part (the clickbait headline notwithstanding).

Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social · 6 pts · 228d (3 replies)

The use of SRAM as an alternative to HBM/DRAM is news for me.

You can get around this by building a bigger chip – each of Cerebras' WSE-3 wafers features more than 40 GB of SRAM on board, but these chips are the size of a dinner plate and consume 23 kilowatts. Anyway, Groq hasn't gone this route.

That is insane electricity usage for 40 GB of memory.

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de · 9 pts · 228d (2 replies)

It's not just the RAM using all of that power, there's also 900,000 processor cores in the chip. All of that SRAM is just cache memory.

otacon239@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 228d

This made me feel a bit dizzy reading that.

The line

I got me 100 GB of RAM

from Weird Al’s All About The Pentiums will need to be updated to 100 GB of cache.

Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social · 5 pts · 228d

Ok that makes more sense, I knew SRAM is relatively costly in terms of power consumption, but the 23 KW seemed like a lot for 40 GM of SRAM.