Qualcomm to Acquire Modular • Hacker News Board

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#51

Post by adonese » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #26

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

He already did that, Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.

I think that was the motivation to make Mojo a superset of python.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#52

Post by re-thc » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:20 AM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #49

re-thc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase. Yes a world of a difference. That’s competing against an Apple M2 vs M4. You’ve given yourself 2 generations of disadvantage. You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too.

> You’re equivalent of saying the Intel delays were a success too. If Trump nuked TSMC's production lines the day before M1 went to production, and the production lines came back 3 years later, would Apple ship the M1 on it? Or, the M3? As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1. If it makes 0 sense, why project that idea onto me? When faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. (and read your inte…

> As you point out, it makes 0 sense to ship the M1.

But that's what happened. Go check the benchmarks. Clearly you haven't. That Snapdragon X that got released (1st gen) was way off the mark.

> When faced with a contradiction

When faced with a hallucination...

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#53

Post by roflcopter69 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

jdub wrote: post #42

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

"first principles" and "from scratch" are predictable failure modes... he had very good reason to pursue a Python-like language given the circumstances and objectives

I think I get what you mean and I should have been more precise in my wording. I didn't mean that an alien language that looks nothing like we have ever seen but for the sake of doing it "right" from scratch would have been a good idea. A new programming language definitely should steal the ideas of other languages that turned out to be good. But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python just because there was too much design pressure to appeal to Python programmers. I wonder what Mojo could have looked like without this particular pressure. Basically, with what kind of programming language would a person with as much experience and good taste as Chris Lattner come up with if there were no such external pressures?

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#54

Post by mathisfun123 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:05 AM UTC

osigurdson wrote: post #50

mathisfun123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never heard of an acquihire?

I don't think $4B is reasonable for an acquihire. They must see value in the technology.

It's an all stock deal. No cash. With undoubtedly a very healthy earn out.

> They must see value in the technology.

What value? Mojo doesn't currently support any of Qualcomm's GPUs.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#55

Post by IMcD23 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:19 AM UTC

markkitti wrote: post #43

Yesterday, LineShine a supercomputer in China emerges as #1 in the Top500 using ARM v9 based chips and no GPUs. Today, Qualcomm a premier designer of ARMv9 licensed chips in the United States acquires Modular, who has been creating a compiler stack that provides an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA stack. Are you ready for Qualcomm ARMv9 powered inference running Mojo/MAX written kernels doing low-cost inference at scale…

Are you a bot?

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#56

Post by adev_ » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:27 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #26

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

He already did that, Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.

> Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.

This was doom to fail from the beginning.

Swift will always have the image of an Apple product binded and controlled by the Apple ecosystem. This is very unlikely to change.

Nobody sane of mind would bind there entire technology stack on something half proprietary with a support was from the beginning secondary outside of Apple platforms.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#57

Post by sipjca » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

afr0ck wrote: post #18

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #17

Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip

Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.

Hasn't pretty much everyone from Nuvia left QC at this point?

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#58

Post by adev_ » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

> sorry for rambling.

You're right to ramble. I also believe that the world need a high level language fitting for accelerators that is not Python.

However developing something like that is by all means not a trivial task and many failed there.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#59

Post by dagi3d » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:48 AM UTC

samuell wrote: post #7

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

I'm actually mostly worried about the future of Mojo at this time. Though hopefully it will be fully released open source still, but I feel there are question marks around whether it will be a priority to continue to develop by Qualcomm, or if they are mainly interested in the AI compute stack? Time will tell I guess, but a lot feels to be up in the air.

According to their website, yes it will be opensourced soon

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#60

Post by havercosine » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

adev_ wrote: post #58

roflcopter69 wrote: post #2

Tbh, Modular getting acquired happened sooner than I would have expected, if ever. Don't know how to feel about this one. Also so many mixed feelings about Mojo, the programming language powering Modular. Of course Chris Lattner is free to pursue whatever he wants, his many contributions to tech will always be highly regarded, but to me it feels as if he "wasted" lots of his precious mental capacity on making Mojo a…

> sorry for rambling. You're right to ramble. I also believe that the world need a high level language fitting for accelerators that is not Python. However developing something like that is by all means not a trivial task and many failed there.

Though, Modular should have been the team to do it. My theory is that they raised too much money too soon. With that kind of money, you get anxious investors waiting to see some magic on quarterly timelines. So Modular was forced to be compatible with Python as there's no other way to win quick developer mindshare. (Though I don't think they managed to do that either).

A closest counter path I would have expected Modular to follow was Zig or Oxide computers (I know not apples to apples comparision). Start actually attacking the problem with hindsight and lessons of 30 years of Python, build something fresh, and try to patiently win the market.

Rust is not going to win this market. The language has too much syntax friction to win over data science/AI folks and doesn't offer too much in parallel programming world. Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia.

In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment. It is likely to be in the similar position that C/C++ have been in embedded and firmware world.