The Story of the Pixel Visual Core
A philosophical dive into Google's Pixel Visual Core — why even domain-specific architectures need general-purpose compilers
boundarycondition.dev
Nathan Zhang
I build compilers, runtimes, and IRs — the infrastructure that makes systems go fast. Currently a Principal Compiler Engineer at SambaNova Systems. PhD from Stanford.
What I Work On
Compiler Design & IR
Finding core abstractions that stay expressive and composable as use cases shift and hardware generations turn over.
HW/SW Co-design
Full-stack design spanning app, compiler, runtime, and hardware — every layer evolving together.
Programming Models
Designing the abstractions programmers use to express computation — streaming interfaces, dataflow, and memory hierarchy models.
Constraint-Based Optimization
Using solvers (Z3/SMT) as a first-class engineering tool — hardware-aware optimization, place and route, scheduling, and system-level constraint solving.