Sure there is. Software is easy to change.

By “beat” I meant in performance.

Obviously you can’t change an asic

an asic is fixed function, so it'll never be able to boot my pc and then be the CPU, even though an asic beats the pants off anything else computing Sha hashes for Bitcoin mining.

By “beat” I meant performance.

Obviously an ASIC is not a general purpose machine like a cpu.

Most ASICs are cost or power optimizations.

Exactly. They’re much faster for their specific tasks and thus are more power efficient and potentially cost efficient

No. Eg of the hardware discussed on the article, the Raspberry Pi uses an ASIC that's slow, cheap and low power vs the Intel or AMD chips.

In some cases ASICs are faster than general purpouse CPUs, but usually not.

I think we’re saying the same thing here.

You can make an ASIC which doesn’t have the same power draw as a CPU, but provides the same performance.

It doesn’t need to be faster than the fastest software implementation, but power per performance will always favor ASIC.

Is the LLM running on an ASIC for the Pi here? I dout it.

The ARM cores and the VideoCore parts are all in the ASIC, it's a SoC type ASIC.

Hmm, yeah it's a SoC, but not an ASIC. Maybe you mean APU? ASICs are circuits thst can only do one thing, CPU cores are definitely not that.

Edit: an example ASIC the Pi has is the video encoder/decoder, with JPEG also supported. I think it's embedded in the GPU.

ASIC just means it's an application specific IC (= chip), meaning it's fabbed for that specific product (like in this case the Raspberry Pi). A functional block like a JPEG codec contained therein is not an ASIC. Quoth wikipedia:

"Modern ASICs often include entire microprocessors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, flash memory and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (system-on-chip)."

What you're describing in the JPEG codec might be termed a fixed function IP block in semiconductor design terminology.

First paragraph of that Wikipedia article:

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC /ˈeɪsɪk/) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec.

That’s weird that Wikipedia says there’s no real distinction between SoCs and ASICS.

Colloquially, I’d never call anything with a programmable processor an ASIC

Some ASICs are SoCs. Some are not.