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After more than a year away from C and C++, Dijo Torres is starting again with small math exercises—and using questions about local AI inference to find a path into accelerator hardware and the computations behind it. His DEV Community post is a personal learning kickoff, not an embedded-systems tutorial or hardware guide.

Why Torres is returning to C++

Torres says it had been more than a year since he last coded in C or C++. Rather than begin with a large project, he chose small mathematical problems as a way back into C++ practice.

That modest starting point soon connected to a larger curiosity: how long would his PC’s GPU take to process a request from a locally run large language model? Following that question led him to consider GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs, and to ask what kinds of computations make these processors useful.

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From local inference to matrix multiplication

The thread running through the post is a progression of questions. Local inference prompts curiosity about accelerator hardware; learning that matrix multiplication is central to many machine-learning workloads leads to questions about how to perform it efficiently; those questions open onto the systems and libraries built around accelerator computation.

Torres names GEMM—general matrix multiplication—and BLAS, a family of basic linear algebra routines, alongside hardware and software concepts including systolic arrays, XLA, MXUs, cuDNN, and CUTLASS. These names sketch the territory he wants to explore; the post does not compare them or explain how to select a tool for a particular project.

The AlphaTensor example that caught his attention

One result in the post illustrates why faster matrix multiplication is an interesting problem. Torres describes a 2022 Google DeepMind paper in which reinforcement learning was used to find matrix multiplication algorithms requiring fewer multiplications than previously known algorithms. For a 4×4 modular-arithmetic example, his post reports 47 multiplications, compared with Strassen’s 49. That figure is the post’s account of the example, not an independently verified performance result or a claim about every matrix multiplication workload.

What the post is—and what it is not

This is an introduction to a learning process, not a technical reference for embedded programming. It does not offer a complete curriculum, teach the named libraries, or evaluate hardware. Its value is in showing how one concrete question—what happens when a local model runs on a PC?—can lead from C++ practice toward the math and systems behind machine-learning computation.

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A commitment to learn in public

Torres closes with the intention to share what he learns as he goes: “Starting today, I’m going to document everything I learn here, in public.” The post is therefore best read as the opening note in a continuing personal journey, rather than a report of completed embedded-systems work.

Rank #3

Read Dijo Torres’s original post on DEV Community.

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