Systems, apparatuses, and methods for proactively managing inter-processor network links are disclosed. A computing system includes at least a control unit and a plurality of processing units. Each processing unit of the plurality of processing units includes a compute module and a configurable link interface. The control unit dynamically adjusts a clock frequency and a link width of the configurable link interface of each processing unit based on a data transfer size and layer computation time of a plurality of layers of a neural network so as to reduce execution time of each layer. By adjusting the clock frequency and the link width of the link interface on a per-layer basis, the overlapping of communication and computation phases is closely matched, allowing layers to complete more quickly.