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  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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.
    by bit_economist
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

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