Triton 3.9.0 added atomic loads and stores, made batched MMAv2 dots up to 40x faster on NVIDIA, and sped up deeply nested loop compilation about 10x
AspireAI community · GitHub (triton-lang/triton)
Triton 3.9.0, released 27 October 2026, is a broad release spanning the dialect, compiler, both GPU backends and the toolchain. On the language side it adds tl.atomic_load and tl.atomic_store with acquire-by-default loads and release-by-default stores, tl.atomic_poll for waiting on a pointer value, approximate FP32 division via tl.fdiv, chained comparisons, keyword-only parameters and integer tl.clamp. On NVIDIA, batched MMAv2 dots are up to 40x faster, barrier insertion was rewritten as a standalone pass, and the sanitizers got faster too, with GSan running up to 3.8x faster on MoE and ConSan about 2.5x faster on one reported workload. Compiler work includes deeply nested loops compiling about 10x faster at nesting depth 8, and a long miscompile-fix list covering reductions, scans, gathers and optimizations that moved loads. The release also records a behaviour change worth noting: E8M0 0x00 now decodes to 2^-127 and 0xFF to NaN, which changes results for kernels using those values.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.