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- Hacker News
- 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 for AI?
by markkitti - Are you a bot?by IMcD23
- Per modular Twitter, the plan is still to open source the mojo compiler this year: https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635
- I honestly think Mojo would be better served if it is just a high-level language for GPU programming that compiles down to PTX with clear Python/Rust interop boundaries instead of trying for the "one language, multiple computational model" thing that they seem to be going for. The programming model between CPU and GPU programming is very different: code that runs best on CPU with heavy branching behaviors should not be written the same way as massively parallel matrix multiplication oriented GPU code, which I think they will be forced to do in the MLIR level anyway.
So, you end up with a language that looks like Python, but doesn't behave like Python, and companies that adopt Mojo early with the promise of Python compatibility may find themselves running into edge cases with difficult to trace compiler error messages that would be nearly impossible to debug, especially with the addition of Zig style `comptime` as their metaprogramming model.
by YuechenLi - Either this was the plan all along (cashing in on the bubble) or it’s an admission of failure.by moscoe
- Mojo seemed like a passion project. The fundamental problem was never the lack of a great programming language, and inventing a python bastard child of a language is not a solution. But, respect and congrats to the Modular folks. HW companies have notoriously bad software teams and culture and hopefully this injects some good sw dna into the acquirer.by bwfan123
- I don't get it.
Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market. The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200.
What could they possibly get from acquiring Modular?
by maxloh - You've never heard of an acquihire?by mathisfun123
- Are the Qualcomm Dragonfly chips not considered high end?by bradfa
- > I don't get it. Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market
You're allowed to get a new job. Qualcomm is allowed to enter new markets.
by re-thc - Qualcomm is pivoting.
It's now focusing on inferencing, both for data centers and edge. They already have an older AI100 NPU card and have other products in the pipeline including server class CPU that they are targeting for "Agentic" applications.
by toxicdevil - > Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market.
There's actually a lot of ML deployed on phones. Both Google's and Apple's photo software uses it heavily for example.
> The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200.
B200/B300/GB300 actually...
by nl - > I don't get it. > > Qualcomm has almost no products in the high-end inference/training market. The industry standard is the NVIDIA Hopper H100/H200. > > What could they possibly get from acquiring Modular?
Don't ask what they will gain from owning it, ask what they will gain from others not owning it...
by sobkas - It's interesting that acquire.fyi data shows tech M&A deal volume is down 11% year to date, but total deal value is up 40%. So, fewer deals are closing in tech, but the deals that are closing are much larger. I wish we had the deal value for this one.
- It's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"by cocoflunchy
- Qualcomm has acquired excellent engineering talent here, the infrastructure I've seen Modular build in the 3 years I've followed the company is insane.by melodyogonna
- Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...by melodyogonna
- I call BS, zero chance this traded at $4B. The fact they describe it as a "chip company" shouldn't give confidenceby nylonstrung
- 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...
by bobajeff - Patents, and tooling portfolio.by pjmlp
- Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.by surajrmal
- 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.
by ssivark - 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.by monkeydust
- > Moving beyond ARM to RISC-V
The reason to move away from arm has nothing to do with performance, but rather avoiding licensing snafus like happened with their laptop chips. So far no one has delivered a risc-v core with class leading performance outside of the really low end. Not saying it can’t be done, but it will likely be a step back at first.
- 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 learning mojo in the hope it might actually become cross platform.
by fancyfredbot - The best cross-platform API is CUDA, because we have ROCm.by ipsum2
- > 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.
Vulkan is mighty fine, but Julia just works for me.
by Archit3ch - 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.
by pjmlp - 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.
by 0xpgm - 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 python-like language instead of trying to come up with something better from first principles. I know, the promise of Mojo eventually being a Python superset has been taken back, which I think is the right move, and I understand why Mojo's initial motivation for being close to Python was to attract ML folks, but I'm getting counterfactual regret just by thinking about what Chris Lattner could have achieved by making a new programming language truly from scratch and not letting some undesireable pythonisms muddy the language.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. Congrats to the team at Modular!
by roflcopter69