• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

GPUs (not video card specific)

C

Cod

Gawd
Joined
Mar 21, 2003
Messages
642
I have a few questions about GPUs that i was hoping someone could shed some light on for me. First, will CPUs ever be able to work at the same level of GPUs? Next, on a related note, why do we even use CPUs? Can't a GPU do a CPUs job and more powerful / better?

I'm sure I'm missing some important concept that makes CPUs valuable, but figured I'd ask to see if one of the processor gurus on this forum could help me out in seeing it.
 
What do mean exactly did you mean by your first question? No a GPU cannot be used as a CPU yet.
 
GPUs excel at highly parallel tasks, while CPUs work with much more diverse instruction sets.

There is some progress on GPGPU but I don't see the technologies converging any time soon.
 
GPUs are an "embarrassingly parallel" architecture for floating point operations. If you give them, say, 1024 operations to perform, and not one is reliant on the state of any other, you can successfully exploit their parallelism and reap the benefit of being able to perform many operations per clock cycle. A CPU is a bit 'smarter'. It doesn't stumble over itself in branches, offers good integer performance and has fast, low-latency caches typically large enough for small blocks of data being worked with. CPUs are best tasked with performing small operations which cannot be trivially paralleized or simply must be performed sequentially. In this sense, they're useful for logic, not just numerical computations.

I could see GPU technology eventually merging into CPUs in a way that's more tightly-coupled than current-generation on-die GPU implementations, but I don't know when that's going to happen.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top