Why are GPUs so big, while CPUs are so small?
In: Engineering
This depends a lot on what you’re actually asking here.
**If your question “why is the chip that is a CPU smaller than the chip that is a GPU”?**
CPU dies are smaller than GPU dies because the work that GPUs do can be better facilitated by shoving more transistors into the space it occupies. CPUs have to handle more specialized work that requires more variation which means they don’t have the opportunity to have a ton of transistors shoved into them and take up a bunch of space.
The CPU is an office building full of engineers and technicians building and designing things.
The GPU is a factory full of assembly lines and operators.
The GPU benefits from shoving more assembly lines and operators into it so that you can feed it more inputs to get more outputs. It doesn’t need engineers and technicians, it needs operators that can make more “things”. The CPU doesn’t strictly benefit from shoving more technicians and engineers into trying to solve the same problem. The CPU would rather have *better* engineers and technicians instead of more of them. (Amusingly, this is what caused the Pentium 4 to have such problems. The design theory of the Pentium processors had hit a physical wall on how fast they could make a processor do processor things. But they NEEDED to make a faster processor…so just shove more “technicians and engineers” into it! Which resulted in a processor that ran insanely hot for little gain.)
**If your question is “why is my graphics card so big while my processor is so small”?**
The graphics card, the whole thing you plug into your motherboard, is better compared against the motherboard+CPU as an entity. Because that’s basically what a graphics card is. It’s a smaller motherboard with its own processor, memory, etc., that plugs into the main motherboard that also has its own processor, memory, etc. Your processor is like the *actual GPU* that is on your graphics card.
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