I know what purpose they serve, but aren’t they both just doing calculations?
In: Technology
The CPU has a relatively small number of cores – up to 4 in home computers, and up to 32 in high end workstation CPUs. Each of these cores if very fast and can do lots of different kinds of calculations.
Meanwhile, a GPU has a large number of relatively weak cores, which specialize in calculations that are used mainly for displaying graphics. A single GPU core is much slower than a CPU core, but there are literally hundreds or even thousands of cores in the GPU, all calculating at the same time.
A CPU is like a pocket knife and a GPU is like a surgeons scalpel.
The CPU is designed to be decent at pretty much everything. The GPU is designed to be really really good at it’s one specific purpose, which in the case of GPU os doing lots and lots and lots of fairly simple and extremely similar calculations in very little time.
CPU: A jack-of-all-trades who can do pretty much every task you throw at it, but can’t do a lot of them at once.
GPU: A specialized robot assembly line which excels in doing a specific task very efficiently, but completely fails if you give it another task.
As it happens, computing graphics is exactly one of these repetitive tasks that are always the same and need to be done millions of times a second. However, GPUs aren’t really limited to graphics calculations, for example crypto mining is also really efficient on GPUs since it’s also very repetitive.
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