Deep Dive: Anthropic's Performance Take-Home (The One Claude Beat Humans At)
Today, Anthropic open-sourced their original performance engineering take-home. The task: optimize a kernel running on a custom VLIW SIMD processor simulator. The baseline takes 147,734 cycles. Claude Opus 4.5 got it down to 1,487 cycles - a 99x speedup that beat most humans. I’m Tristan (@trirpi), and I work on AI kernels. Let’s break down how this whole system works. The Architecture at a Glance This is a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) processor with a single core (older versions of the take-home had multiple cores). Let me break down what that means. ...