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?

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A typical CPU these days will have something like 8 cores/16 threads meaning that it can do up to 16 things at once. Each core is very powerful and designed to be general-purpose so they can do a wide range of things. The things that are best done on CPU are tasks that are serial meaning that the previous step needs to be finished because the result of it is used in the next one.

A typical GPU may have something like 2304 stream processors, meaning that it can do up to 2304 things at once, but what each stream processor can do is much more limited. What a GPU is most suited for is doing math on a big grid of numbers. With a CPU, it’d have to calculate those numbers 16 at a time (actually, less than that because the CPU has to do other things) but with a GPU, you can do math on those numbers 2304 at a time.

But it turns out that graphics are pretty much nothing more than a big grid of numbers representing the pixels. And a lot of scientific calculation involves doing math on huge grids of numbers.

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