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What can a cpu core do that a gpu core can't do? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Afaik, gpu cores a very stripped down cpu cores that do basic math, but what sort of math can cpus do that gpus can't

I'm talking, cpu core vs Tensor/Cuda cores.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

CPUs and GPUs are both Turing complete, so from a computation perspective, they can technically do the same things. However each is optimized for a different set of metrics, so it may be wise to target a particular workload to one over the other.

The CPU is optimized for minimum latency, aka maximum single threaded performance. This is really important for a lot of workloads.

GPUs are optimized for maximum throughput and are willing to suffer higher latency to achieve it. There are many architectural differences as a result of this goal, for example: GPUs don't have branch prediction, they also don't have out of order processing, and also have much smaller caches per computational unit. All of these saves a ton of transistors, which can be used to add more cores.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

GPUs are not necessarily Turing complete, BTW.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

So no point in making Linux or Windows that can run 100% within GPU and leaving a very minimal CPU to handle data transfer between drives, keyboard, etc and GPU.

I'd like to see someone with a 4090 GPU running Windows and a Motorola 68000 as the CPU to handle drives.