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
A CPU can do a few things quickly, and a GPU can do a lot of things slowly.
Imagine you have to get from New York to California and back as fast as you can. You can take any car you want, but only you are allowed to drive. You’d get the fastest sports car you could, and drive it as fast as you can. But if you had to take 30 people, you’d want to take one trip with a bus instead of 30 trips with the sports car.
CPU and GPU is the same idea. When you make a picture for a game or video, each pixel can be done without worrying about the other pixels – so you have a few million pieces of math that have to be done, it would be better to do them slowly but in big batches than quickly but one at a time.
(ELI25 notes)
There’s also some fundamental differences in the memory model and instruction sets between CPUs and GPUs. GPUs are designed to perform operations important to graphics programming quickly – for example, trigonometric functions that take many cycles on a CPU typically complete in few (usually only a single) GPU cycles. GPUs also have many areas of memory with different sharing characteristics, while CPUs generally just have the RAM and varying levels of cache.
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