As a former Groq engineer, the LPU branding is not really technically accurate. These are general purpose compute chips with excellent software for transformer models. In the sense that the GroqChip is general-purpose, it is basically a highly parallel, high performance, deterministic execution engine. It 'rivals' GPUs in the sense that obviously both are used for AI execution. The whitepapers cited are basically a perfect model for how the chips operate. As you can see, they are general purpose tensor units.
That being said, yes the software is impressive and the engineering team at Groq is top-notch.
Unfortunately, the chips are mainly aimed at inference, and it seems like a lot of the large investments at the moment are being driven by training.
EDIT: In the spirit of full disclosure, I suppose I should point out that I own lots of Groq shares, so have every interest in their success.
do you think the article explains it well what LPU is?
The compiler obviously knows how to schedule all this to produce good timing. That's why the utilization is so high. Every piece of the chip is being used. Whereas with a GPU model, you have to kind of play 'code golf' and have a deep understanding of the architecture and the execution engine to be able to determine when a memory access is going to cause a pipeline stall.
If you understand the ISA of the GroqChip, you understand completely how the chip works. There is no pipeline stall. There is no waiting for memory. There is no memory hierarchy. Even the interconnects work at the same speed as the chip (or something like that... it's all in the paper, so public information), so when they network chips together, the latency between any two subunits of every chip is already known by the network topology and the chip timings.
TL;DR It's all very deterministic and this works well for tensor operations. Parallelism is determined at compile time
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb0PYhLk9r8 . This is basically exactly how the chip works. It's not some simplified architectural or marketing diagram. It's literally how it works.