Grep (or ripgrep at least) is i/o bottlenecked at this point. It's impossible to process data at faster than i/o speeds, since you have to get the data to the processor somehow. That doesn't change whether that processing is grep on a CPU, or LLM on an ASIC.

ripgrep may be.

I did a toy project once implementing a limited version of grep on an FPGA and was able to get some speedup over GNU grep at the time, though marginal.

In any case, LLMs aren't IO bound :))

GPUs and inference ASICS also have large amounts of high bandwidth memory, plus lots of high speed storage cache, and dedicated very high bandwidth scale-out and scale-up networks. Because they are also often bound by I/O bandwidth.

If your problem is grepping crazy amounts of data, the infrastructure for LLMs isn't a bad place to look for an example.

i/o could still be sped up though? And I dunno, maybe this actually is an argument for how the llm version could end up being faster, because there is lots of investment in crazy fast i/o hardware and protocols to get the data into the chips.