How are CPUs and GPUs different in build? What tasks are handled by the GPU instead of CPU and what about the architecture makes it more suited to those tasks?

Question

How are CPUs and GPUs different in build? What tasks are handled by the GPU instead of CPU and what about the architecture makes it more suited to those tasks?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

CPU “waste” silicon trying to predict the future (branch prediction), to remember the past (cache) and to have it’s different cores try to agree with each other (coherency protocols).

GPU is the dumb but effective approach: every body does the exact same thing, on data that are right next to each others. They can’t do anything else, they can’t wait, they don’t “think”, they don’t talk to their neighbors, they just do.