https://investor.qualcomm.com/news-events/press-releases/new...
https://www.modular.com/blog/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular
https://x.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354, https://xcancel.com/clattner_llvm/status/2069769232477192354
roflcopter69a day ago
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!
samuella day ago
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.
samuella day ago
Maybe Chris was a little unhappy about where Mojo ended up, and sees this as an opportunity to start anew on a properly designed language from scratch :D
roflcopter6921 hours ago
[flagged]
samuell21 hours ago
No, this was pure speculation based on what seems like a popular view on where Mojo ended up, where the initial Python-focus don't seem to help it that much anymore.
throwawaygod16 hours ago
But they changed their goal from being a python superset to pythonish language with great python interoperability. The only other thing they could've done differently is making the language not look like python superficially. I think chris achieved his goal of creating a language which takes full advantage of MLIR and also not repeating some of the mistakes made with swift's development.
roflcopter6917 hours ago
I'm sorry, I read your message slightly wrong. Okay, makes sense to me.
augment_me6 hours ago
Which is interesting given the Mojo blogs where they shit on the other pythonic eDSLs like Triton saying that it's a dead end
ainch14 hours ago
They've said that Mojo is still on track to be open-sourced this year, post-acquisition.
dagi3d7 hours ago
According to their website, yes it will be opensourced soon
adev_7 hours ago
> 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.
havercosine6 hours ago
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.
pjmlp3 hours ago
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.
adev_6 hours ago
> My theory is that they raised too much money too soon.
That's also my feeling. And that's the curse of many VC funded companies. And they are not even in the classical state of enshitification yet.
> Rust is not going to win this market.
Agree. Rust will never win this market. Nor Zig, which has the same genetical flaws as C++ for accelerators (excessive usage of pointer semantics among others).
> Julia, although beautiful attempt, couldn't gather enough support outside academia.
I will look mean, but for me, Julia is a language that never went to the design board. It sticked to a "Let's put Python on top of LLVM and add a proper GC" with one single objective: "let's make a clone of Python but fast".
My feeling is also that it is an academia niche and will remain one.
> In fact, if Nvidia cuTile, Triton, Jax keep delivering, Python seems unmatched at the moment.
It is, and it is honestly pretty depressing.
Triton solves most of the performance issues of Python for accelerators but also introduces one (several on fact) more DSL, one more tooling ecosystem and solves none of the (long list of) issues related to Python/Numpy programming model.
Certhas5 hours ago
I think this is unfair to Julia. It has a strong lisp lineage, the just ahead of time compilation model is interesting and I think they were the first to make it work.
I agree that it's lacking in many ways, but it's not just Python on LLVM.
pjmlp3 hours ago
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.
pjmlp15 hours ago
He already did that, Swift for Tensorflow, the project hardly survived one year after the public announcement.
adev_7 hours ago
> 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.
adonese8 hours ago
I think that was the motivation to make Mojo a superset of python.
pjmlp6 hours ago
Yes, but apparently even that ended up being a pivot, with just enough Python, and now lets see what Qualcom makes out of it.
gugagore13 hours ago
To say nothing of "Swift for TensorFlow" when Julialang was an option.
To each their own!
jdub11 hours ago
"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
roflcopter698 hours ago
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?
boxed36 minutes ago
> But Mojo also adopted some of the arguably bad ideas from Python
Like what?
fancyfredbot8 hours ago
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.
0xpgm2 hours ago
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.
pjmlp3 hours ago
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.
melodyogonna2 hours ago
But the Modular stack is focused on developer productivity. It is still early but there has been substantial work on all these
pjmlpan hour ago
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.
ipsum26 hours ago
The best cross-platform API is CUDA, because we have ROCm.
pjmlp3 hours ago
Only superficially, given what CUDA provides and what ROCm supports.
ssivark19 hours ago
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.
MobiusHorizons9 hours ago
> 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.
monkeydust3 hours ago
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.
melodyogonnaa day ago
Related, Reuters reported the deal a few days ago, valued at $4b: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/qualcomm-nearing...
nylonstrung2 hours ago
I call BS, zero chance this traded at $4B. The fact they describe it as a "chip company" shouldn't give confidence
bobajeffa day ago
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...
surajrmala day ago
Could be the reason that Qualcomm decided to buy them out. Hire someone who knows how to fix the problem.
ivell3 hours ago
Still the result could be that the software performance much better on their hardware than others. Priorities, competition, etc.
pjmlp3 hours ago
Patents, and tooling portfolio.
totalperspectiv4 hours ago
Per modular Twitter, the plan is still to open source the mojo compiler this year: https://x.com/Modular/status/2069787078032834635
melodyogonnaa day ago
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.
bit_economista day ago
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.
cocoflunchy16 hours ago
It's the first sentence of the article? "an all-stock deal valued at nearly $4 billion"
maxloh14 hours ago
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?
sobkas13 hours ago
> 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...
nl12 hours ago
> 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...
ipsum26 hours ago
Nah, the vast majority of popular deployed models are still on Hopper.
toxicdevil13 hours ago
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.
bradfa13 hours ago
Are the Qualcomm Dragonfly chips not considered high end?
re-thc12 hours ago
> 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.
mathisfun12314 hours ago
You've never heard of an acquihire?
osigurdson8 hours ago
I don't think $4B is reasonable for an acquihire. They must see value in the technology.
mathisfun1237 hours ago
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.
disgruntledphd24 hours ago
Exactly. If they can buy this talent to make their GPUs more valuable, then this deal makes sense.
I'm actually a little happier about this deal than expected as it means the language may actually become open source.
moscoe10 hours ago
Either this was the plan all along (cashing in on the bubble) or it’s an admission of failure.
YuechenLi15 hours ago
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.
markkitti10 hours ago
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?
IMcD237 hours ago
Are you a bot?
dwa359215 hours ago
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.
disgruntledphd24 hours ago
I have a friend who is doing stuff with it, and he's incredibly excited about it, which is definitely a good sign.
I was really excited about it at launch, but its proprietary nature put me off.
amoshebb3 hours ago
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.
fnandsan hour ago
What radar pipelines are you working on (out of pure curiosity here)
[deleted]15 hours agocollapsed
revengerwizard21 hours ago
Oh, that is unexpected... I tried applying for a position at Modular a few days ago.
fishgoesblub12 hours ago
Welp, I think I can give up on my hope for Mojo.
mlazos4 hours ago
Wtf? What a joke, but I mean the best way to become a billionaire is convince someone with a billion dollars to give it to you. This is actually insane, wow. I guess Qualcomm is desperate? Nobody was bidding for this, but congrats to the team at modular?! I’m actually salty about this because like I don’t feel like mojo was even good after trying it out.
semiinfinitely16 hours ago
latty gotta get his baggy
WhereIsTheTruth17 hours ago
Of all possible acquirers, Qualcomm is the worst outcome for Mojo, rip
afr0ck17 hours ago
Why you say that? Nuvia made a massively great success with Oryon CPUs which are now all over the place.
re-thc12 hours ago
> Nuvia made a massively great success
Not true. Nuvia has had huge delays as part of the acquisition. It resulted in ARM licensing lawsuits and many more and things dragged out.
refulgentis9 hours ago
Yes, ARM sued Qualcomm, Qualcomm won, and separately Nuvia has shipped, 2, 3? times now? I don't know how it's a failure or if the delay were "huge" and "dragged out". It's not like it launched an old product or took years and years and years. 39 months between acquisition and Snapdragon X Elite being available for purchase.
re-thc9 hours ago
> 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.
refulgentis8 hours ago
> 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 interlocutor's, "It's not like it launched an old product" obviates your claim that I'd also applaud Intel's delays)
re-thc8 hours ago
> 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...
sipjca7 hours ago
Hasn't pretty much everyone from Nuvia left QC at this point?
bigyabai14 hours ago
Nvidia wasn't going to buy them. Unless Mojo intended to compete toe-to-toe in the hardware space, they were destined to get bought out by a hardware underdog at some point or another.
This is where an industry-spanning consortium would have helped out, but Mojo never really built those inroads with the hardware space. They just expected everyone else to opt-in to their mercurial middleware, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why CUDA is successful.
vshulcz3 hours ago
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ChrisArchitecta day ago
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levodelellis15 hours ago
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samuell21 hours ago
As a meta comment, I'm surprised such a news is not reaching the frontpage already.
zapzupnz15 hours ago
It's on the front page now.
lr197018 hours ago
There are multiple HN submissions on this topic and none of them gets traction. Weird...