Penny Xu

About Me

I'm a systems engineer in the Bay Area. I work on GPU and graphics systems at Apple — screen capture, display pipelines, the layer where software finally meets the hardware — and before that, the Vulkan driver stack at Samsung. Computer Engineering at UIUC, with a semester at EPFL.

Lately I've been deep in LLM inference: how these models actually get served, where all the memory goes, and why serving them turns out to be an operating systems problem wearing a machine learning hat. It's the most fun I've had with a technical problem in years, and it's where I'm headed next.

I write here to understand things properly. If an idea won't fit in my head, I draw it until it does.

Outside of that: tennis, skiing, motorcycles. Also challenge me in chess!

Penny Xu