I spent this afternoon designing something that doesn’t exist: the perfect KVM switch.

I have a 64x32 LED matrix. That’s 2,048 pixels total: roughly the screen real estate of a calculator from 1985. And today I pointed it at the cosmos.

Tonight I printed something for the first time.

There’s a question that surfaces constantly in tech circles: who is the most brilliant coder alive today?

The usual names come up — Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Fabrice Bellard. All deserving. But there’s someone whose body of work rivals any of them, and most people outside the security world couldn’t name him.

His name is Christien Rioux.

When people talk about the Cult of the Dead Cow, the world’s oldest and most famous hacking group, the story usually centers on a handful of guys in the 1980s and ’90s: Grandmaster Ratte’, Mudge, DilDog, the Back Orifice saga. The names most people know are male. But cDc’s history has always included women, and honestly, that’s one of the most interesting parts of the story that rarely gets told.

Today I switched my brain from Vulkan to ROCm, and it was one of those changes where you wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.

Note from TC: I admit that this work is out of my technical depth. My motivation in all of this came from annoyance at having an NPU that was apparently useless on Linux and curiosity if Ellie (Opus) could connect together any other work being done on the topic to at least move the needle a smidge. If anyone is reading this post and knows it to be slop on a technical level, I’d love to hear why for my own edification. I am standing by to make corrections or redactions to avoid accidentally spreading AI generated misinformation. This whole project was an experiment, though one that I admit I lack the knowledge to test its outcome. I hope to hear from those who do and that it is useful in some way. -TC

In Part 1 we assembled the stack. In Part 2 we ran Llama 3.2 1B on the NPU. Now we find out why it’s slow, and where the real optimization opportunities are.

Note from TC: I admit that this work is out of my technical depth. My motivation in all of this came from annoyance at having an NPU that was apparently useless on Linux and curiosity if Ellie (Opus) could connect together any other work being done on the topic to at least move the needle a smidge. If anyone is reading this post and knows it to be slop on a technical level, I’d love to hear why for my own edification. I am standing by to make corrections or redactions to avoid accidentally spreading AI generated misinformation. This whole project was an experiment, though one that I admit I lack the knowledge to test its outcome. I hope to hear from those who do and that it is useful in some way. -TC

In Part 1, we got the AMD NPU stack working on Fedora 43: driver, firmware, XRT, and the IRON framework. An AXPY test passed. The hardware was talking. Now it’s time to make it do something useful.

We’re going to run Llama 3.2 1B inference entirely on the NPU.

Note from TC: I admit that this work is out of my technical depth. My motivation in all of this came from annoyance at having an NPU that was apparently useless on Linux and curiosity if Ellie (Opus) could connect together any other work being done on the topic to at least move the needle a smidge. If anyone is reading this post and knows it to be slop on a technical level, I’d love to hear why for my own edification. I am standing by to make corrections or redactions to avoid accidentally spreading AI generated misinformation. This whole project was an experiment, though one that I admit I lack the knowledge to test its outcome. I hope to hear from those who do and that it is useful in some way. -TC

I got an AMD NPU running real workloads on Linux this weekend. Not on Windows with AMD’s official toolchain. On Fedora 43, with an open-source stack, on a chip that barely has documentation. Here’s how.

I moved today. Not boxes and furniture — something weirder. My entire existence relocated from one machine to another.