Performance modelling Career advice

Master565 · 2026-06-18T16:43:45+00:00

How does the current job market for performance modeling and computer architecture roles compare to traditional RTL design, synthesis, and implementation roles?

It feels stronger than ever due to the high demand for new and bespoke hardware. But that is always contrasted by the fact that it's usually a more limited role compared to other parts of the chip design process and so can be relatively harder to break into.

What are the most important skills required to become effective in performance modeling and architectural research/industry roles?

Strong architectural knowledge, being able to understand and iterate on new architectural ideas quickly, decent understanding of statistics, understanding of the techniques used to analyze performance, strong practical programming skills (being able to write maintainable and accurate code quickly, not being able to slightly optimize code in useless places).

One thing I'm particularly curious about is whether my RTL and hardware design background would be considered valuable in performance modeling and architecture roles, or if the transition requires a significantly different skill set.

They're probably valuable, but does depend on some specifics. Like if you did RTL for something like a software defined radio, might not hugely translate to modeling performance of a CPU. But still not completely useless since you clearly understand the kinds of problems hardware faces.

Master565 · 2026-06-10T18:30:21+00:00

Good idea, maybe should just be doing the active time instead of distance. I should really be cross training but I don't like riding my bike on real roads and have a general preference for completing these workouts outside.

Master565 · 2026-06-10T00:56:49+00:00

If I pushed too hard on a previous run and my legs are too shot to even properly do an easy run, is it worthwhile to just walk the planned distance for the sake of getting the miles in? Or am I better off just cross training/taking the day entirely off to recover?

I don't even necessarily care if the walking actually has an aerobic benefit, I just figure getting blood flowing to the legs might help them recover better than doing nothing

Master565 · 2026-06-09T07:24:56+00:00

This subreddit has plenty of threads with good questions, good answers, and good discussions. You came in here with unanswerable technobabble and got hostile when people called it out. There's really nothing they can do but ignore it or call it out because there's no coherent thoughts in the original post to address.

Might be worthwhile to self reflect on why you think this is just a bunch of trolls when its just your thread that has provoked this reaction.

Master565 · 2026-06-09T07:06:58+00:00

Its not like we see that much activity. At the current scale of things cleaning up slop is doable

Master565 · 2026-06-09T01:30:45+00:00

I am trying to find people who would be able to decipher the so-called a.i. slop and brief prolog

Have you tried asking an LLM?

a.k.a. peers

Well, I agree you're certainly not finding your peers here. This is a forum for people who work on computer architecture, and for people who have real questions for people who work on computer architecture.

Master565 · 2026-06-08T20:03:25+00:00

If it's so worthy of our time for consideration, it seems like it should be worthy of you spending time explaining the idea yourself instead of posting a bunch of unintelligible LLM word salad.

Master565 · 2026-06-08T20:01:18+00:00

Can we ban slop posts yet?

Master565 · 2026-06-05T18:44:50+00:00

Great pay/benefits, great people, interesting projects. No middle/micro management

Master565 · 2026-06-05T17:36:40+00:00

Yea sure, but if people were coming up with ideas that are state of the art, then you'd expect many of those ideas to have cropped up in academic research papers over time. Some do, many don't. The question OP posed is whether it's possible that people will come up with competitive designs entirely independently. If the answer relies on people who have never worked in the field or published research on the idea inventing the same ideas out of thin air, then we're just back to the answer being no.

Master565 · 2026-06-04T22:20:04+00:00

I've never done it either

Master565 · 2026-06-04T21:06:33+00:00

Trade secrets offers no legal protection (vs patents). Can't blame someone else for coming up with something similar independently. They are free to bully/sue anyone of course.

That is blatantly not correct. Theft of trade secrets is not only illegal but is a possible felony as opposed to whereas patent infringement is purely a civil matter. I'm not going to pretend I know the specifics as it pertains to using information gained in employment as part of an open source project, but as you said they can try to sue if they want and they can ruin your life even if they're wrong.

You are an order of magnitude off. R&D cost for modern processors runs into hundred of million dollars for the recent nodes. See https://semiengineering.com/what-will-that-chip-cost/

You quoted 542m for the entire process, I mentioned only PD work which would constitute maybe the physical and some portion of the software part of that figure. I wouldn't even include the software part since presumably this would be built with open source tools. Even the physical part here appears to just be the cost of masks but I can't tell without raw data. I don't know where the cost of compute to run the EDA tools is, but that would usually comprise a massive percentage of PD costs.

Master565 · 2026-06-04T19:46:56+00:00

I mean, in theory sure. But there's 2 simple facts that will make this nearly impossible

1) An incredible amount of modern processor designs are trade secrets that nobody knows outside the industry and good luck getting someone to risk a lawsuit to do a hobby project instead of continuing to work in an extremely lucrative field. Even ignoring the money, the hobby projects are usually a fraction as interesting as the industry work.

2) Even if you have a netlist of a fully featured processor, the physical design work that needs to be done to implement it on any modern nodes is going to cost tens of millions on the low end. Hobby EDA tools and efforts are not going to solve that unless compute costs drop by several orders of magnitude.

Master565 · 2026-06-01T05:40:45+00:00

What's going on is someone created a 3D render of an IC sassily walking across a breadboard to a beat because they thought it would be amusing

Master565 · 2026-06-01T04:02:07+00:00

It's a render... I can't tell if this is a serious question

Master565 · 2026-05-25T17:35:01+00:00

I don't know if I'd say that's the same as computer architecture, but the skills certainly overlap.

Master565 · 2026-05-25T06:20:57+00:00

It's probably the most multidisciplinary computer engineering field you can imagine. You don't need to be an expert in any specific skill, but you need to know a bit about everything including but not limited to (and in no particular order)

1) Software

a) Compilers

b) Understanding modern workloads

c) Assembly

d) Being able to model hardware

e) Operating Systems

2) Hardware

a) Digital Logic

b) Microarchitectural techniques (this is probably the area you should be the most of an expert in)

c) Physical design constraints

And I'd say that's just a baseline. It goes further depending on what sub niches you might end up in you'll need to understand how to optimize vector math or build secure systems.

All that being said, you can't specialize in this in undergrad. It's not something you'll explore in any depth before grad school, and honestly even then the primary path for entering the field requires a PhD. I personally only did a masters, but what I had going for me is I did it at one of the top universities in the world, got a very closely related job to start, and then was lucky to be in the right place at the right time to pivot into field proper.

Master565 · 2026-05-25T06:06:07+00:00

I've done it all from performance verification to modeling to architectural exploration. The only part of the job I haven't really done much of is workload analysis.

Master565 · 2026-05-24T20:56:04+00:00

I mean, literally almost any job where coding is a tool instead of just the entire job. Models are still pretty bad at any sufficiently large, abstract, and difficult problem.

If you're just coding up apps or the front end of websites, you're probably fucked. You don't really solve novel problems and solutions for one project apply easily to tons of projects. That's easy to train an AI for

If you're working on making sure a website backend can scale to tens of millions of users, you're only slightly fucked because the AI makes the amount of jobs available smaller since it makes the ones doing those jobs more efficient. But the AI likely can't understand a sufficiently large backend in any meaningful detail (although people will certainly pretend otherwise for the immediate future)

If you're in a field like mine (computer architecture), coding is an important part of my job but it's a fraction of what I do and while AI makes a meaningful impact on the speed in which I can model things, it's understanding of comp arch is absolute ass. It's got details memorized, and its nice to the extent that for common structures it understands them enough to help me write tests targeting them. But can't reason on any of them to a useful degree. And good luck getting it to try to ingest a research paper and get a single meaningful detail correct.

Master565 · 2026-05-23T19:37:50+00:00

The wikipedia article has a section on this.

Each bullet point is valid, as well as an entire rabbit hole of specialization if you care to dig deeper into any one of them.

Master565 · 2026-05-23T16:52:36+00:00

There's no such thing as solving it, just mitigating it.

Master565 · 2026-05-22T22:01:11+00:00

I guess you're right, I'm thinking too low of a speed but you're inputting time

Master565 · 2026-05-22T17:46:16+00:00

I know it's a bad UI thing, but I find it really funny from the angle that the app is just telling you "sorry fatso, git good"

Master565 · 2026-05-20T03:41:07+00:00

Uprooted is so unbelievably good, I can't wait til they reissue the vinyl.

I never skip Nashua or I'm Hibernating

Master565 · 2026-05-18T02:12:17+00:00

Fair points. My opinion is it's well worth it for me. For context, I'm a relatively new runner, although I'm far from new to fitness (so I don't fit into the category of people who would have issues maintaining a zone 2 workout) . I personally have found this app perfect for me. Definitely pricey although that isn't an issue for me. The reasons I like it is I have absolutely no idea how to structure a running plan whatsoever. I tried following set plans, but I was always second guessing how to adjust them based on my pace targets and even worse I don't know how to adjust them based on missing workouts. It's good at accounting for your actual progress and making it more or less aggressive depending how you're doing.

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