The Three Stages of Production Performance

The real-world performance of computer hardware is never determined by the hardware alone. It is the product of three sequential efforts: the hardware itself, the software stack running on it, and the tuning applied to that stack. Think of it as a three-stage rocket:

This simple model, recently presented to Intel's executive leadership, is worth stating publicly because much of the industry's discussion of hardware performance ignores two-thirds of the equation. The Internet is full of comparisons between vendors based on raw hardware specifications alone. But the choice of software—and the tuning applied afterward—can dramatically change results for a specific workload. Reaching maximum competitive performance requires all three stages to fire in sequence.

Why Vendors and Customers Both Need the Full Picture

It is understandable that hardware vendors, like the wider tech community, can become fixated on the first stage. But customers evaluating hardware need the complete view just as much. Consider a TensorFlow benchmark comparing two hardware vendors. Was the Intel system tested with the Intel Extension for TensorFlow Software? Was it subsequently tuned? A fair and realistic comparison must use the best available software and tuning for every vendor in the test.

The Components of Third-Stage Engineering

A significant portion of performance work happens in the final stage—what we can call third-stage engineering. This discipline rests on roughly four pillars: people, training, tools, and capabilities.

  • People: You need staff dedicated to performance work.
  • Training: Those staff must understand performance methodologies and the internals of both software and hardware.
  • Tools: They need analytical tools—both observational and experimental—to inspect system behavior.
  • Capabilities: They must have the means to act on their findings, whether through tunable parameters, configuration settings, or code changes.

Too many hardware evaluations claim to predict customer performance while considering only the first stage of the rocket. That approach serves neither vendor nor customer. All three stages are required to reach the highest altitude.