Do you have an uncommon desire to seek out and solve exceedingly difficult challenges rather than the easy ones? Do you grow with adversity? Do you believe that truly valuable and meaningful accomplishments are the result of pushing the limits of perseverance? Do you believe that a world-class team with relentless drive can surpass even their own high expectations? We do! But we also realize this job isn’t for everyone. What we do isn’t easy but you don’t take the easy path. Apple is seeking a highly motivated and ambitious engineers to join our group that is driving advanced exploration for next generation iPhone, iPad, and Mac CPU architectures.

The CPU architecture and performance team is responsible for exploring and defining micro-architecture that will push the performance and efficiency of our CPU designs to an even more advanced level. The team is composed of experts with deep experience in architecture, ISA definition, performance micro-architecture, power control architecture, performance modeling, power modeling, simulation environment, and workload analysis. We define or have an impact on the CPU designs from our smallest to largest devices, while working cross-functionally with software and system partners across Apple to improve our roadmap and the end user experience.

The team has offices in Cupertino, CA, Beaverton, OR, Austin, TX, and Cambridge, MA

Below are the various areas you can explore within CPU Platform Architecture:

CPU Core Architecture:
We focus on solving hard problems in the area of CPU Performance and Architecture to improve user experience on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices. We pursue advanced micro-architecture ideas for improving performance of CPU pipeline, branch predictors, code and data prefetchers, load/store unit and several other related areas. These improvements are made through close collaboration with our software partners on iOS and macOS to deliver the most optimal overall performance solution. We rely on strong analytical skills to identify performance bottlenecks on relevant workloads, craft ideas to solve them and implement those ideas in the performance simulator. The group conducts continuous research in focused CPU areas and provides guidance to Apple CPU design team on features that should be implemented in future CPUs. The life cycle from conception of idea to feasible implementation is achieved through close collaboration with CPU design teams.

CPU Memory Subsystem Exploration:
This group focuses on advancements to the performance, power, and area-efficiency of the CPU cache and memory subsystem. Research is conducted into future memory latency tolerance techniques, development of next-generation data prefetchers, CPU caching topologies and policies, vector/matrix acceleration, and SoC architectures supportive of CPU performance. Exploration is aided by performance model development, data analysis, and novel AI/ML techniques. Roles in this group also require close collaboration with CPU design teams to see ideas through from ideation to feasible implementation.

CPU Simulation Environment:
The engineers in this group push forward the tools and methodologies used for performance exploration, bottleneck identification, and insight discovery. From the CPU simulator to visualization tools, innovations in productivity boost the output of the entire team. Areas of work include C++ and Python software engineering, CPU simulation methodologies, execution-driven model development, data analysis and visualization tool development, leadership in CI/CD, runtime optimization, AI/ML model development for architectural exploration, and more.

CPU Performance & Workload Analysis:
We focus on identifying and analyzing the workloads that matter to our users on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices. Using performance analysis capabilities architected into our hardware, the team works on gaining insights into workloads to provide feedback to software teams to help optimize software for our CPU cores. The team also uses custom hardware to capture traces that enable the exploration teams to simulate future micro-architectures on our performance simulator.

The group also develops in-depth performance analysis tools to provide deeper insights into the workloads we analyze.

Bachelor’s degreeKnowledge of CPU architecture