Foundation Model Kernel Optimization in 2026: A Field Guide Across Dense, MoE, Multimodal, and Diffusion
Foundation Model Kernel Optimization in 2026: A Field Guide Across Dense, MoE, Multimodal, and Diffusion Most “kernel optimization” conversations still start with FLOPs. In 2026 that is usually the wrong first question. Foundation-model runtime is dominated by HBM traffic, KV cache, temporary tensors, collectives, dynamic permutation, and launch overhead. FlashAttention, fused linear–cross-entropy, paged KV, MoE grouped GEMM, and DeepEP-style dispatch all share one essence: do not materialize intermediates, or make each byte travel once. ...