Why GPU can has thousands of cores while CPU only has a few?

Question

Why GPU can has thousands of cores while CPU only has a few?

In: Technology

Answer 1

because workloads that happen on GPU are easily paralleled, unlike workload CPU handles

there’s Amdahls law that defines performance boost you can get from increasing thread count, and for example if your parallelization is at 50% there’s no increase in performance over 16 threads

for computation tasks (that’s what GPU does all the time) you can parallel almost perfectly, you just feed them tasks and take end result

problem is, most of your daily tasks aren’t purely computation as you always put in new data and tasks, like in gaming there’s constant user input that changes what’s needed to be calculated

that’s why AMD CPUs show good results in synthetic benchmarks, but in gaming even low core count high clock intel CPUs get better results