Why are GPUs so big, while CPUs are so small?
In: Engineering
In ELI5 short, CPU has the motherboard to support it with power control, memory etc while a GPU has to do all this by itself. This is because GPUs came later than CPUs and the general interface was thus laid for CPU.
The GPU unit includes its own motherboard and memory and cooling system. It’s basically a computer of its own dedicated to graphics processing that you attach to your main computer.
In addition to what was already said. Talking about the actual die (silicon chip), CPUs are alright at anything, very general purpose, GPUs perform relatively easy calculations many times, imagine calculating what colour a pixel should be, 8 million pixels (for 4k) at a time, 60 times a second. GPUs have a lot of cores. 4090 has 16384 cores compared to very high end CPU having measely 16-32 cores
gpu = graphics processing unit, a chip
cpu = central processing unit, a chip
graphics card = houses memory, a logic board, heat sink and the gpu
think of your graphics card as a computer in a nice small package. it has its own cpu, and motherboard and other pieces prebuilt.
Your cpu is a single chip that is apart of the entire computer.
Why do GPUs have 0 RPM fan modes, but motherboards don’t have 0 RPM modes for your CPU fan?
The actual chip is about the same size. It’s just they tend to run much hotter than cpus. 99% of a gpu is cooling because they tend to run hot especially newer chips.
They are actually about the same size.
Your CPU is attached to your motherboard with a cooler on top.
Your GPU is attached to it’s own board and cooler.
They have giant heat sinks. If you buy a high-end CPU, you’ll need a fairly sizeable cooler to cool it, and some of the larger CPU coolers are about the size of a GPU
GPUs are pretty much self-contained with its own voltage regulator modules, ram, GPU silicon and heatsinks.
So a better comparison would be GPUs with the mobo + cpu + ram + heatsink.
If you compare the CPU chip and GPU chip, they are not that much bigger or smaller, depending on the model and gen they are in. Also, GPUs have the silicon die + heatsink factory installed while off-the-self cpus have the cpu package that has an integrated heat spreader.
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