Open Source

The First SQL Engine for Apple Silicon GPUs Is Now a DuckDB Community Extension

In May 2026 I shipped gpudb v0.1 — the first SQL execution engine targeting Apple Silicon GPUs, built as a DuckDB extension with a CUDA backend on Linux. Three releases later, the project crossed two lines at once. v0.3.0's streaming-aggregate rewrite reached parity with native DuckDB on end-to-end TPC-H queries — the worst cell improved roughly 100×, from 11.05 s to 0.109 s. And gpudb became an official DuckDB Community Extension: INSTALL gpudb FROM community now works in any DuckDB ≥ 1.5.5, signed, no flags. This is the full arc — what v0.1 proved, what v0.2 honestly lost, what v0.3 fixed, and why the next GPU frontier is joins.