Thanks for great challenge, first of all (you were our taskmaster, right?) I didn't mention your solution, because it was kind of slow for comparisons. But now I see where it and challenge itself have originated. PDL is very TIMTOWTDI-ish, and range is ultimately important tool, to extract/address rectangular areas from ndarrays of any dimensions. But, eh-hm, don't you see that the POD you linked sings praises to wonders of broadcasting, which (i.e. broadcasting) you simply discarded? Broadcasting really only happens in this fragment:

...-> sumover-> sumover
[download]

which you replaced with

...-> clump(2)-> sumover
[download]

(Frankly, it's obvious I think that huge speed difference of Game-of-Life implementations in the linked tutorial is due to the way looping was generally performed rather than this "broadcasting" only, -- but perhaps that's how tutorials work.)

Consider:

sub sms_WxH_PDL_range ( $m, $w, $h ) {
    my ( $W, $H ) = $m-> dims;
    
    $m-> range( ndcoords( $W - $w + 1, $H - $h + 1 ), [ $w, $h ])
      -> reorder( 2, 3, 0, 1 )
      -> clump( 2 )
      -> sumover
}

sub sms_WxH_PDL_range_b ( $m, $w, $h ) {
    my ( $W, $H ) = $m-> dims;
    
    $m-> range( ndcoords( $W - $w + 1, $H - $h + 1 ), [ $w, $h ])
      -> reorder( 2, 3, 0, 1 )
      -> sumover
      -> sumover
}

__END__

     Time (s) vs. N (NxN submatrix, PDL: Double D [300,300] matrix)
      +-----------------------------------------------------------+
      |+          +         +          +          +          +    |
  1.6 |-+                                                    A  +-|
      |                                                           |
      |                                                           |
  1.4 |-+                                                       +-|
      |                                                           |
  1.2 |-+                                                       +-|
      |                                           A               |
      |                                                           |
    1 |-+                                                       +-|
      |                                                           |
      |                                                      B    |
  0.8 |-+                                                       +-|
      |                                  A                        |
      |                                                           |
  0.6 |-+                                         B             +-|
      |                                                           |
  0.4 |-+                        A                              +-|
      |                                  B                        |
      |                     A                                     |
  0.2 |-+               A        B                              +-|
      |             A   B   B                                     |
      |        A  B B                             D          D    |
    0 |-+  D D D  D D   D   D    D       D        C          C  +-|
      |+          +         +          +          +          +    |
      +-----------------------------------------------------------+
       0          5         10         15         20         25
                        sms_WxH_PDL_range    A
                      sms_WxH_PDL_range_b    B
                         sms_WxH_PDL_lags    C
                        sms_WxH_PDL_naive    D
  +----+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  | N  | A     | B     | C     | D     |
  +----+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  | 2  | 0.015 | 0.008 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
  | 3  | 0.021 | 0.018 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
  | 4  | 0.044 | 0.021 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
  | 5  | 0.073 | 0.047 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
  | 6  | 0.101 | 0.060 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
  | 8  | 0.193 | 0.104 | 0.000 | 0.005 |
  | 10 | 0.294 | 0.138 | 0.000 | 0.005 |
  | 12 | 0.435 | 0.232 | 0.000 | 0.010 |
  | 16 | 0.711 | 0.344 | 0.000 | 0.015 |
  | 20 | 1.115 | 0.549 | 0.000 | 0.026 |
  | 25 | 1.573 | 0.828 | 0.000 | 0.047 |
  +----+-------+-------+-------+-------+
[download]

(I took liberty to use couple of numbers as args to ndcoords instead of matrix/slice, which only serves as source of these 2 numbers). Note, the matrix is now smaller than in previous tests. Both A and B versions are very much slower than the so far slowest "naive" variant. Though ndcoords builds a relatively large ndarray to feed to range, I think range is simply not written with speed/performance as its goal.

It's actually tempting to try to improve Game of Life PDL implementation from the tutorial:

use strict;
use warnings;
use experimental qw/ say postderef signatures /;
use Time::HiRes 'time';

use PDL;
use PDL::NiceSlice;
use Test::PDL 'eq_pdl';

use constant STEPS => 100;
my $x = zeroes( 200, 200 );
 
# Put in a simple glider.
$x(1:3,1:3) .= pdl ( [1,1,1],
                     [0,0,1],
                     [0,1,0] );
my $backup = $x-> copy;

printf "Game of Life!\nMatrix: %s, %d generations\n", 
    $x-> info, STEPS;

# Tutorial
my $t = time;
my $ct = 0;
for ( 1 .. STEPS ) {
    my $t_ = time;
    # Calculate the number of neighbours per cell.
    my $n = $x->range(ndcoords($x)-1,3,"periodic")->reorder(2,3,0,1);
    $n = $n->sumover->sumover - $x;
    $ct += time - $t_;

    # Calculate the next generation.
    $x = ((($n == 2) + ($n == 3))* $x) + (($n==3) * !$x);
}
printf "Tutorial: %0.3f s (core time: %0.3f)\n",
    time - $t, $ct;

# "Lags"
my $m = $backup-> copy;
$t = time;
$ct = 0;
for ( 1 .. STEPS ) {
    my $t_ = time;
    # Calculate the number of neighbours per cell.
    my $n = sms_GoL_lags( $m ) - $m;
    $ct += time - $t_;

    # Calculate the next generation.
    $m = ((($n == 2) + ($n == 3))* $m) + (($n == 3) * !$m);
}
printf "\"lags\":   %0.3f s (core time: %0.3f)\n",
    time - $t, $ct;
    
die unless eq_pdl( $x, $m );

sub _do_dimension_GoL ( $m ) {
    $m-> slice( -1 )-> glue( 0, $m, $m-> slice( 0 ))
      -> lags( 0, 1, ( $m-> dims )[0] )
      -> sumover
      -> slice( '', '-1:0' )
      -> xchg( 0, 1 )
}

sub sms_GoL_lags ( $m ) {
    _do_dimension_GoL
    _do_dimension_GoL $m 
}

__END__

Game of Life!
Matrix: PDL: Double D [200,200], 100 generations
Tutorial: 1.016 s (core time: 0.835)
"lags":   0.283 s (core time: 0.108)
[download]

Sorry about crude profiling/tests; and improvement is somewhat far from what I expected. Even with "core time" singled out -- because next gen calculation is not very efficient (e.g. $n == 3 array is built twice), but that's another story -- which is "only" 8x better. Maybe all this glueing/appending to maintain constant matrix size and "wrap around" at edges takes its toll.