why can’t we only use graphic card to run operating system… Just like we can play low end videos games with just cpu power?

Question

Curious

In: Technology

Answer 1

GPUs have fundamentally different working principle from a CPU. A CPU can execute a long sequence of complicated instructions quickly, but can only handle a few such sequences at the same time.

A GPU can only handle really short sequences of instructions, but can handle several hundred to several thousand such sequences simultaneously.

For regular software, such as web browsers and operating systems, they consist of long sequences of instructions that would not be possible to implement for a GPU. But the rendering of graphics in a game consists of a short task that needs to be repeated a lot, for example calculating light and color for each pixel, each pixel is a short sequence but there are thousands of pixels that can be calculated in parallel. Other tasks such as training machine learning models and mining cryptocurrency are also suitable for running on a GPU.