A typical System-on-Chip (or SoC) in a modern smartphone, tablet, or a laptop will have a structure like this: You may have one ore more CPU cores, some number of GPU cores, a multimedia controller (for hardware accelerated video encode/decode). Modern SoCs may also include a neural network engine (NPU) for inferencing. The chip will also include one or more memory controllers (for DRAM) and several I/O controllers (for WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular modem, etc.

In my very first “real” job after graduate school, a few of us who had joined recently were given an overview of the server processor chip we were going to work on. In that overview session, the principal architect of the chip said, “No matter what area you are working on, 85% of your time will be spent on debugging something that isn’t working the way it was intended. So get good at debugging to root cause.