on sm80+ non-Hopper GPUs (Blackwell, Ada, Ampere) with the flash-attn package installed, FA2 kernels replace the SDPA fallback. priority is FA3 > FA2 > SDPA. measured 28% faster than SDPA on GB10, and makes sliding-window attention fast on Blackwell (where FA3 is unavailable). no effect on H100: USE_FA3 wins whenever available so runs/speedrun.sh on 8xH100 runs the same kernels as before. tests/test_attention_fallback.py::TestFA2VsSDPA compares FA2 and SDPA output on any sm80+ GPU with flash-attn installed.
context: https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/discussions/710 (the writeup was produced from my dgx-spark branch at https://github.com/matt-langston/nanochat/tree/dgx-spark, which carries these two PRs plus a DGX-Spark-Bundle-specific speedrun script I kept separate)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
SDPA fallback now respects sliding window during single-token KV-cache
decode by slicing K/V to the last (window + 1) tokens.
Also simplifies the mask building for chunk inference to properly apply
sliding window in that path as well.
Fixes#452
Co-Authored-By: Kartik Vashishta <kartikv776@gmail.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* test: add engine generation tests for expected invariants
- test_seed_reproducibility
- test_temperature_zero_determinism
- test_max_tokens_respected
- test_num_samples_count
🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* Fix temperature test
* add test for seed variation in sampling
Add test for seed variation in sampling with temperature > 0.
* Rename test for clarity
* Shorten assert msg
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Sofie Van Landeghem <svlandeg@users.noreply.github.com>
Previously, when generating multiple samples (num_samples > 1), the first
token after prefill was sampled once and broadcast to all rows, causing
all samples to start identically. Now the prefill logits are expanded to
num_samples and sampled independently for each row.
Also simplified the generation loop by moving the forward pass to the end
of the loop, eliminating the first_iteration flag and if/else branching.
🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Performance varies by machine and load, making hard assertions flaky.
🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
