

Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs - aladdinw


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stonemetal
Why can't our GPUs be as powerful as our CPUs?

Simple, they make different tradeoffs to target different tasks. GPUs are
horrible at code that is branch heavy, CPUs tend to be much better at that
kind of code. GPUs make trade offs for fast memory access, ever hear of a GPU
with 32GB ram? and vice versa.

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drivers99
I think it's also that there are so many cores. For example, there are 768
CUDA cores on a GTX 650 Ti.

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chas
Right, they can fit so many cores on a chip because they are very optimized
for one type of work (streaming vector math) and don't have things like
branch-predictors that would make them good for general purpose work.

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felipebrnd
GPUs are great crunching numbers and CPUs are better with complex logic
stuff...

And GPUs have a lot of simplified cores they simply can't handle every
operation a CPU core can. Maybe you can get a hybrid hardware... replacing the
space used for CPU cores by GPU cores and some kind of fast access memory...

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caw
Wasn't that one of the things that the Cell processor was trying to do?
Originally there wasn't supposed to be a GPU for the PS3.

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voidlogic
branches

