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A detailed analysis of how NVIDIA GPU programming evolved from Volta to Blackwell, highlighting the shift from synchronous thread models to asynchronous dataflow and the challenges of feeding Tensor Cores. The article discusses new hardware features like TMA, TMEM, and tcgen05 MMA, and shows how modern kernels like FlashAttention-3 and FlashMLA exploit these changes for higher utilization.
dMX is a differentiable mixed-precision quantization framework that learns optimal floating-point bit-width assignments per layer for LLMs, targeting the MXFP family of formats defined by the OCP standard. It uses continuous optimization with temperature-based annealing and a budget-aware regularization term, consistently outperforming KL-divergence heuristics on Llama, Qwen3, and SmolLM2 models.
Mix-Quant proposes a phase-aware quantization framework for agentic LLMs, using NVFP4 quantization for the prefilling stage to accelerate computation while preserving BF16 precision for decoding to maintain accuracy. The method achieves up to 3x speedup in prefilling with minimal performance degradation on agentic benchmarks.
A page from Modal's LLM Engineer's Almanac that provides an interactive explorer for understanding low-precision floating-point formats like bf16 and fp4.