Pre-Silicon CPU Architecture & Platform Performance Engineer

Advanced Micro Devices; Town of Texas (WI); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is seeking an engineer to build workload-relevant models of future CPU platforms before silicon is available. You will translate disclosures and observed data into explicit assumptions about next-gen Intel, Arm, NVIDIA and more, explaining performance on real workloads with quantified uncertainty.

You will calibrate models against measured data, decompose bottlenecks, and work with workload engineers to create microbenchmarks that isolate key architectural effects.

Qualifications

• Deep hands-on experience in CPU microarchitecture, silicon performance, system architecture or performance modeling.
• Strong knowledge of out-of-order pipelines, branch prediction, fetch and decode, execution back ends and SMT behavior.
• Expertise in cache, TLB, coherence, prefetching, memory controllers, NUMA, bandwidth, latency and capacity scaling.
• Experience with hardware performance counters, profiling tools, microbenchmarks, system telemetry and bottleneck analysis.
• Strong quantitative and scripting or data-analysis skills used in performance investigations.
• Ability to reason from incomplete information, make assumptions explicit and show unknowns can change conclusions.
• Clear technical writing and visualization skills, with emphasis on reproducibility.

Responsibilities

• Develop comparative models of CPU front ends, execution resources, branch behavior, cache/TLB hierarchies, and NUMA behavior.
• Model platform constraints including memory bandwidth, PCIe, CXL, networking and power limits.
• Translate public roadmaps into explicit, confidence-scored assumptions with alternate cases.
• Calibrate models using measured silicon, performance counters and telemetry.
• Perform bottleneck decomposition to explain workload preferences and responsible architectural mechanisms.
• Create microbenchmarks and kernels with workload engineers to isolate effects.
• Evaluate ISA and acceleration features in real applications rather than theoretical peaks.
• Quantify performance-per-watt and rack-density implications as architectures evolve.
• Maintain version-controlled assumptions and sources for peer review and reproducibility.

Skills

CPU microarchitecture

silicon performance

system architecture

performance modeling

hardware performance counters

profiling tools

microbenchmarks

data analysis

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in electrical or computer engineering

Tools

Profiling tools

Performance counters

Benchmarks

Job description

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is seeking an engineer to build workload-relevant models of future CPU platforms before silicon is available. You will translate disclosures and observed data into explicit assumptions about next-gen Intel, Arm, NVIDIA and more, explaining performance on real workloads with quantified uncertainty.

You will calibrate models against measured data, decompose bottlenecks, and work with workload engineers to create microbenchmarks that isolate key architectural effects.