- load_operand_tile ColMajor path issued one LDG then immediately scattered 16 byte-granular shared stores, so every store waited on the preceding global load; the runs of one row group now batch into registers first (v[kPasses]) and scatter after, overlapping the LDG latencies
- hoist pass-invariant predicates: the alignment check folds to one uniform (base | ld) & 15 test since r0 is always a multiple of 16, and rows_full leaves the per-pass condition; the contract tail zero-fills without global traffic
- RowMajor path hoists the row bound and the (invariant) chunk-alignment check out of the per-chunk loop
- measured (cuda events, old/new interleaved): crosswise bwd gemms +5-9%, RowMajor and fwd NT within noise; model step unchanged (in the 563-617 ms band)
- file passed through clang-format with the new .clang-format config