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

submitted 11 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 11 months ago

It depends what type of GPU "core" you are talking about.

What NVIDIA refers to as CUDA/Tensor/RT cores are basically just glorified ALUs with their own itsy tiny control. But for the most part they are just an ALU.

For the most part CPUs tend to be more complete scalar processors, which they include the full control datapath as well as multiple Functional Units (FUs) not just an floating point unit.

The distictions are moot nowadays though; a modern GPU includes their own dedicated scalar core (usually in terms of a tiny ARM embedded core) for doing all the "housekeeping" stuff needed for them to interface with the outside world. And modern CPUs contain their own data-parallel functional units that can do some of the compute that GPUs can.

In the end the main difference is in terms of scale/width of data parallelism within a CPU (low) vs a GPU (high)