All terms
Hardware & Systems
Roofline Model
A chart that shows whether a workload is limited by memory bandwidth or by compute.
Definition
The roofline model is a performance framework that plots achievable compute throughput against arithmetic intensity, the ratio of arithmetic to bytes moved. Its characteristic roof shape has a sloped memory-bandwidth ceiling and a flat peak-compute ceiling. Where a workload falls reveals whether it is memory-bound, where more bandwidth would help, or compute-bound, where more arithmetic capacity would. Systems engineers use it to diagnose bottlenecks in training kernels and inference pipelines.