[rfoo]

Uh, three? I worked at $CORP where we had a three people sub-team, they reverse engineered most of Volta's SASS instruction encoding, built a working SASS assembler (before the open source one of course), with the ultimate goal of making GEMM / Conv faster. And they did it. Though it wasn't applied to a high-profile enough big picture so we never heard about it :>

If you don't believe me, previous open source SASS assemblers were mostly from university, they surely didn't have that many people.

[bjourne]

Did $CORP also release the im0lementation to make it trivial for others to replicate their work?

[rfoo]

I think we did release some of the optimized kernels but I don't think we have released any one with SASS black magic, at least not before I left. Already been sanctioned by BIS, better not annoy NVIDIA furthermore.

[DannyBee]

Actually, a number of them did. Even Google did.