Mastodawn

In my second substack post I talk about some of the challenges of building an ecosystem, but I end with a surprising twist: everything involved in building an ecosystem in a new tech venture is actually things you should be doing anyway.

https://codeandrew.substack.com/p/my-brilliant-technology-needs-an

My brilliant technology needs an ecosystem. Now what do I do?

So many new technologies need an ecosystem to be viable, but no-one wants to build one for me

Andrew Richards

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Andrew Richards Jan 7

SYCL is now truly turning into a cross-platform high performance software development platform with Qualcomm's upcoming support. This started when Qualcomm the UXL Foundation.

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Andrew Richards Jan 7

"We’ll also be introducing native OpenCL 3.0 support, also as used by our other products. And then in the first quarter of 2026 we’d like to introduce SYCL support, and SYCL is a higher-end compute-focused API and shading language for a GPU. It’s an open standard, other companies support it, and it helps us attack some of the GPGPU use-cases that exist on Windows for Snapdragon."

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Andrew Richards Jan 7

Read the interview with Eric Demers here for lots more interesting details on Qualcomm's GPU: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/diving-into-qualcomms-upcoming-adreno?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web It's a fascinating interview for me because it covers the benefits and challenges of low-power GPUs. We hear lots about very high-end GPUs and Gigawatt datacentres, but bringing those GPUs to the consumer and much lower power consumption is going to make GPU-accelerated applications like AI much more useful for those of us without our own nuclear power station.

Diving into Qualcomm's Upcoming Adreno X2 GPU with Eric Demers

Hello you fine Internet folks,

Chips and Cheese

Andrew Richards Jan 7

What's interesting is how SYCL is being used for such a wide range of applications. We've seen SYCL used in supercomputers for science, medical systems for diagnostics and now for new applications targeting Windows PCs. This is a real proof-point of the benefits of cross-platform development: it lets developers target high performance for a very wide range of use-cases because of the freedom to choose the right hardware for the job.

Andrew Richards Dec 14

I spent a lot of my time at Codeplay wondering why it was so hard to build a disruptive technology company. A lot of what I ended up focusing on was the ecosystem. In technology, ecosystems are critical, especially for businesses. But they're not a direct revenue-generator, so they get overlooked. I thought I would start writing about it here: https://codeandrew.substack.com/p/why-is-disruptive-technology-so-hard This is going to be a mix of tech and entrepreneurship. I hope it's both helpful to tech founders & also starts a good discussion

Why is disruptive technology so hard?

I mean: you've invented something that can change the world, so why aren't people throwing cash at you?

Andrew Richards

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Andrew Richards Oct 13

@juanfr imagine a future where the UK's leading business minds had funded Sir Clive to bring wafer scale chips, advanced batteries, and electric vehicles to market instead of telling him to do all the mundane work they should have been doing themselves. The UK's economy would have been so much stronger

Andrew Richards Jan 8, 2025

Phoronix Jan 8, 2025

Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Clang-OpenMP-To-SPIR-V

Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution

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Andrew Richards Jan 8, 2025

@mcc @TomF you're right. Removing registers and local variables from a language is stupid. But maybe less stupid if the language will never be directly programmed by a human

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Andrew Richards Jan 8, 2025

@mcc thanks I found this interesting and brought up memories. How exciting Forth was in its day. But that was compared with languages that were awful and machines with tiny memory. So a system that reduced down to something so simple made so much sense. I loved it until I tried it and then realised it could never be used for anything useful. I came to this conclusion right before it became the entire basis of desktop publishing, typography, and enterprise computing