the.com/roofline
The ceiling on your genius, drawn by how fast you can feed it data.
means The silhouette or shape traced by the top edge of a building, where it meets the sky.
from A straightforward compound of 'roof' (from Old English 'hrof,' meaning the covering of a building, possibly related to words for 'top' or 'crown') and 'line,' a word tracing back through Old French and Latin 'linea' for a string or thread used to mark a straight edge. Put them together and you get exactly what it says: the line a roof draws against the sky — architects and real-estate copy made the compound common, no trickier origin than that.
- origin
- named for the roof-shaped graph it draws
- axes used
- plots performance against operational intensity
- two walls
- bounded by memory bandwidth and peak compute
- real lesson
- most hardware waits on memory, not math