What is job design?

What would be a good career choice for a new grad who has job offers in CPU design and GPU design (front end RTL) groups?

• Some details: I'm a new grad with Masters. I've academic background in CPU arch and know almost nothing about GPU architecture/micro-architectures. I'm leaning toward the GPU design group but any advice will be highly appreciated.

• Answer:

  Thanks for the A2A. Personal opinion follows, so take it with a grain of salt. In my opinion, at this stage in your career - CPU vs GPU - it doesn't matter. A new grad RTL designer will be doing similar things in both companies, writing block level RTL code, probably doing gatesims and/or preliminary PnR, or assisting the physical design team with that, assisting verification efforts with coverage analysis and bug fixes, etc.  EDIT (thanks to for correctness): If you're looking at staying in one focus field or another, the market recently seeing more innovation in GPUs because customers are finding gains in the parallel nature of the operation of GPUs. This allows offloading of various tasks that are highly compute intensive away from the CPU, and therefore scales performance to new heights. But that doesn't mean that things will stay the same. And in the end, any large scale device or system will likely have a combination of both GPU and CPU. The skills you pick up at an entry-level job in either focus will be fairly similar and overlapping. Don't think that your knowledge in CPU microArch will be useless in a GPU design group, either. So my opinion is to pick based things like your fit with the team, the company (if they are groups in different companies), how well the company is doing, perceived responsibility level, and compensation.