GOOGLE OPEN-SOURCES ML DRIFT, A GPU ENGINE THAT RUNS ONE SHADER SET ACROSS OPENCL, METAL, WEBGPU, AND OPENGL ES

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

Tensor virtualization decouples a tensor's logical layout from its physical GPU allocation, so one shader template replaces separate backend-specific codebases. For edge LLMs, ML Drift switches kernels between compute-bound prefill and memory-bound decode, using a convolution-aligned KV cache layout and in-kernel activation quantization to skip memory roundtrips. It cut YouTube Shorts frame latency by up to 40%, and Google co-optimized it with Arm, Intel, and Qualcomm GPUs.