- Rotate kStages+1 canonical buffers for direct-crosswise operands so their load issues right after barrier 1 and its LDG+PRMT latency overlaps the MMA phase, instead of stalling the post-compute inter-barrier window (ncu on the production 24L/dim1536/ffn6912 shapes: barrier 3.7-4.1 + long-scoreboard 1.6-1.8 stalls per issue before).
- Split the stage loaders into load_async (cp.async operands, committed after the post-compute barrier) and load_direct (ring-indexed by tile, not stage, since the rings differ in depth).
On the production shapes vs cuBLASLt _scaled_mm: dX 1.11-1.24x (from 1.27-1.42x), dW 1.32-1.35x (from 1.26-1.49x); generic 4096/11008 shapes also improve (dX 37.6->40.8 TF, dW 36.0->37.3 TF). fp8 train step vs bf16: ~1.2x at both 512 and 2048 tokens.