Earlier this month with CUDA 13.1 NVIDIA announced the CUDA Tile programming model as " the largest and most comprehensive update to the CUDA platform since it was invented two decades ago " The intermediate representation (IR) to CUDA Tile is now open-source software.
The CUDA Tile IR is based on the MLIR intermediate representation out of the LLVM project. CUDA Tile IR being derived from Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) is very significant and could help in seeing CUDA Tile IR being supported in non-NVIDIA environments. AMD makes use of MLIR to varying degrees in their AI/compute environment, Google's IREE plays a big role here across different vendors, Intel has a dialect of MLIR for their hardware , etc. Various IR frameworks like ONNX-MLIR, MLIRE-AIE, Torch-MLIR, and others exist too. With CUDA Tile IR being based on MLIR could help in lowering it and ultimately bringing CUDA Tile IR targeting software to other GPUs/accelerators. At the very least CUDA Tile IR being open-source will eventually help efforts like ZLUDA .
The CUDA Tile code consists of the Tile MLIR dialect, Python API bindings, the bytecode representation, and a conformance test suite.
"CUDA Tile IR is an MLIR-based intermediate representation and compiler infrastructure for CUDA kernel optimization, focusing on tile-based computation patterns and optimizations targeting NVIDIA tensor core units. The project provides a comprehensive ecosystem for expressing and optimizing tiled computations for NVIDIA GPUs, simplifying the development of high-performance CUDA kernels through abstractions for common tiling patterns, memory hierarchy management, and GPU-specific optimizations.
It's fabulous seeing NVIDIA make CUDA Tile IR open-source and will be interesting to see what the future holds in 2026. The open-source code can be found on GitHub . The open-source code is under an Apache 2.0 license.