VLIW Kernel Optimization
07 Oct 2026Earlier this year, Anthropic released one of their interview questions - a take home challenge to optimize a kernel (not an OS kernel, a kernel in the sense of being the core operation loop of a program) for a toy VLIW (Very Large Instruction Word) architecture. While this type of programming is not my specialty per-se, the more I mentioned this challenge to people in casual conversation, the more this challenge felt like an exceptionally good way to help people understand and visualize what is going on with these types of problems, and what each iterative improvement towards making the kernel faster is actually doing. In this two part blog series, I’d like to look at this problem from two perspectives:
