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Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs
6 points by aladdinw on April 23, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



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.


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


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.


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...


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.


branches




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