NervanaSystems/maxas

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases archived

Adoption not part of the score

1074 stars · 174 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

MaxAs is an assembler for NVIDIA Maxwell GPU architecture that assembles SASS (Shader Assembly) instructions, written in Perl. It enables low-level GPU kernel authoring, including a hand-tuned SGEMM example, and is now officially discontinued by Intel.

Use cases

• assemble SASS instructions for NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs
• write hand-optimized GPU kernels in shader assembly
• study Maxwell instruction scheduling and control codes
• build a highly optimized SGEMM kernel from scratch
• reverse-engineer or patch compiled CUDA kernel assembly

When to choose

• you need precise control over Maxwell SASS instruction encoding or scheduling
• you are researching GPU microarchitecture or instruction-level optimization on Maxwell hardware

When to avoid

• you target newer NVIDIA architectures (Pascal, Volta, Ampere, etc.)
• you want a maintained tool - the project is archived and no longer accepts patches
• you prefer writing kernels in CUDA C rather than raw assembly

Facets

library · maturity abandoned

compiler developer-tools gpu-computing gpu-computing compilers hardware deep-learning cli python sass-assembly nvidia-maxwell cuda assembler perl discontinued linux

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