Why We're Stuck With GPUs This Long?

I'm probably not the only one who checks every few months whether a GPU alternative has finally shipped, mostly so I can cancel a few subscriptions.

Nobody doubts it's physically possible or that people have tried. The real question is why it hasn't actually happened, and the answer is economic and structural, not technical.

GPUs are not uniquely ideal. They're uniquely general

LLM workloads are dense matmul, high parallelism, memory-bandwidth-bound compute. GPUs handle this well but weren't built for it specifically. An ASIC purpose-built for transformer inference should beat a GPU on perf-per-watt and perf-per-dollar, and in narrow slices, it already does:

Groq's LPU beats GPUs on single-stream inference throughput for models that fit its architecture