Abstract: A system applies bottleneck analysis for design and optimization of computing systems. In particular, the system constructs a bottleneck model, including a bottleneck cost graph for a workload or a function, through which factors corresponding to the execution costs of an arbitrary processor can be modeled. By using the bottleneck analysis, the system can determine bottleneck factors for an obtained cost value (e.g., time taken by an application's execution on a processor) and can reason about obtained high cost. The system determines and uses information about parameters impacting bottlenecks for execution costs and their approximate relationship with the bottlenecks to produce an optimized hardware-software configuration for execution of one or more workloads. Systematic, bottleneck-guided analysis and optimization can introduce explainability in the design and optimization process and can achieve more efficient design configurations much faster.