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Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

reuters.com

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Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#81

Post by 0xpgm »

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…

I might be reading this differently, but isn't the acquisition a bet that Modular will become a manufacturer-agnostic software stack?

> "We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#83

Post by pjmlp »

melodyogonna wrote: post #80
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am yet to see the same Windows love as CUDA.

Same to IDE integration and graphical debugging experience for GPU code.

Until now, it was been the usual UNIX cli, and text mode lldb like debugging for CPU side.

At least it what I have been made aware of.

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#84

Post by fnands »

amoshebb wrote: post #73
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…

What radar pipelines are you working on (out of pure curiosity here)

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#85

Post by boxed »

roflcopter69 wrote: post #53
jdub wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 becau…

> But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python

Like what?

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#86

Post by khurs »

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…

Looked up Mojo

"Mojo aims to combine the usability of a high-level programming language, specifically Python, with the performance of a system programming language such as C++, Rust, and Zig

Mojo builds on the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) compiler software framework, instead of directly on the lower level LLVM compiler framework like many languages such as Julia, Swift, C++, and Rust.[16][17]

MLIR is a newer compiler framework that allows Mojo to exploit higher level compiler passes unavailable in LLVM alone, and allows Mojo to compile down and target more than only central processing units (CPUs), including producing code that can run on graphics processing units (GPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and other accelerators.

It can also often more effectively use certain types of CPU optimizations directly, like single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) with minor intervention by a developer, as occurs in many other languages"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language)

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#88

Post by mshockwave »

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.

indeed, open sourcing is only half (or even less) of the picture: who is driving the open source community and how it is driven (i.e. governing structure) are probably more important IMHO. There are countless of cases where an open source project is either killed by slow death, or dictated by a single entity. Chris's previous projects like LLVM and MLIR are fortunate enough to grow and thrive organically, and that takes years if not decades to cultivate

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#89

Post by mshockwave »

0xpgm wrote: post #81
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…

I might be reading this differently, but isn't the acquisition a bet that Modular will become a manufacturer-agnostic software stack? > "We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said.

one of the reasons I rarely read press releases is that I don't believe in promises -- I believe in _incentives_. In this case, what will Qualcomm be incentivized to do? What are in their interests?

Re: Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

#90

Post by paufernandez »

0xpgm wrote: post #81
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…

I might be reading this differently, but isn't the acquisition a bet that Modular will become a manufacturer-agnostic software stack? > "We believe the future belongs to developer-friendly, horizontal platforms that can run across diverse compute environments and give customers real choice in how and where they deploy AI," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said.

I also believe this. And I think very few people can pull it off, and Chris Latt ner is precisely one of them. I hope that the agreement includes open sourcing Mojo at some point. Chris mentioned fall 2026, iirc.
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