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Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

reuters.com

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Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#71

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Lisp, see Connection Machine and Star Lisp.

Several decades of their time.

Best of all, it is actually compiled without JIT drama.

This is the reasoning behind the guys that have created a whole new Common Lisp frontend to LLVM for biochemistry research at MIT.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#72

Post by pjmlp »

havercosine wrote: post #60
adev_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Mod…

Julia and the Python JITs from GPU vendors will.

Mojo already lost the moment AMD, NVIDIA and Intel decided to fully support Python and Julia.

Additionally all of the parallel programming improvements in ISO C++ are coming from them as well, Modular did not have much moat when being a follower and not a driver.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#73

Post by amoshebb »

dwa3592 wrote: post #29

Has anyone used mojo/modular extensively in their work? I installed it as soon as it was available but never went past the toy examples.

I tried, also all a little while ago, really found the puzzles fun to do and then tried to implement some basic radar pipeline things and found lots of just basic 'building blocks' for signal processing (i/o things, fft) were missing to the point I went back to JAX.

I'm still not manage memory on GPU the way I would like, but mojo (or, my ignorant first stab at it) did not let me exploit direct DMA type things anyway.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#74

Post by pjmlp »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #48

Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time le…

The competition to CUDA and proprietary 3D APIs always overlooks developer productivity.

For some strange reason there is this expectation, maybe due to UNIX background of those folks, that portable APIs have to exist without good IDE tooling, no graphical debuggers, no high level programming models, no libraries ecosystem.

Then for some "strange" reason, GPU developers mostly pick proprietary and the cycle repeats itself.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#75

Post by pjmlp »

ipsum2 wrote: post #62
fancyfredbot wrote: post #48

Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time le…

The best cross-platform API is CUDA, because we have ROCm.

Only superficially, given what CUDA provides and what ROCm supports.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#76

Post by pjmlp »

bobajeff wrote: post #5

It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks. * https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

Patents, and tooling portfolio.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#78

Post by ivell »

surajrmal wrote: post #8
bobajeff wrote: post #5

It's kind of funny that Modular is getting acquired by a hardware company considering what it's founder has said repeatedly in interviews and articles about how those companies fail to make AI stacks. * https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-ai-compute-part-9...

Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.

Still the result could be that the software performance much better on their hardware than others. Priorities, competition, etc.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#79

Post by monkeydust »

ssivark wrote: post #15

Qualcomm seems to be assembling a whole portfolio of technologies/products aimed at 1. Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V 2. Being competitive for AI/could needs instai of just chips for phones and other edge devices. Interesting to see bold and high-conviction moves in this direction. Tenstorrent, Modular, Ventana, Alphawave, etc.

Whats peoples thoughts on Tenstorrent - they were looking for funding on Hiive recently but that deal got pulled when Qualcomm rumours surface a week or so ago.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#80

Post by melodyogonna »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
fancyfredbot wrote: post #48

Modular now joins SYCL, OpenCL, and One API on the list of cross platform languages which never really became cross platform. After so long and so much investment in AI, the best cross-platorm API we've got for high performance Kernels is vulcan, a graphics API. That is sad. Still, this is pretty good for Modular's employees, probably good for Qualcomm. It's just terribly disappointing for anyone who invested time le…

The competition to CUDA and proprietary 3D APIs always overlooks developer productivity. For some strange reason there is this expectation, maybe due to UNIX background of those folks, that portable APIs have to exist without good IDE tooling, no graphical debuggers, no high level programming models, no libraries ecosystem. Then for some "strange" reason, GPU developers mostly pick proprietary and the cycle repeats i…

But the Modular stack is focused on developer productivity. It is still early but there has been substantial work on all these
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