Why does WD use cpu?

[yitazii]

At the end of the week i do a weekly full WD scan. During these scans ive noticed that it uses the cpu rather than the gpu. Wouldn't the gpu be better at scanning a pc because gpus are really good at doing a bunch of small computations at once like how a scan just quickly checks a single file?

[Electronics Wizardy]

 WD? The company?

 

What program are you using?

 

Its hard to know why devs did what they did, but GPU do much different instructions than CPU, and struggly with the workload.

 

It may also be harder to dev for GPUs, and GPUs are much more picky with driver versions.

[yitazii]

31 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 WD? The company?

 

What program are you using?

 

Its hard to know why devs did what they did, but GPU do much different instructions than CPU, and struggly with the workload.

 

It may also be harder to dev for GPUs, and GPUs are much more picky with driver versions.

mb i meant windows defender with WD

[Eigenvektor]

GPUs are highly specialized components. They are primarily good at vector math, nothing else. They aren't well suited for general computation like a CPU, especially branching code (if-then-else). They are also primarily built around "Simple Instruction, Multiple Data" (SIMD). They excel when you can send them a ton of data and they can perform the exact same operation on all of it. They really aren't well suited for scanning files.

 

~edit: scanning files should generally also be IO bound, not CPU bound, so moving to a GPU wouldn't really help make things faster.

 

Even if a GPU is capable of running the code used to compare files to well-known virus patterns, it wouldn't make much sense. You'd need to read a whole bunch of files into the GPU's memory, then have the GPU scan all of them in parallel, then read the next bunch of files into its memory, scan them again… that likely would take more time then simply scanning them on the CPU.

[yitazii]

13 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

scanning files should generally also be IO bound, not CPU bound, so moving to a GPU wouldn't really help make things faster.

 

OI? IO bound? When i do a full WD scan my cpu is usually at 100% util. Could you elaborate?

[Eigenvektor]

Just now, Fat Cat11997 said:

OI? IO bound? When i do a full WD scan my cpu is usually at 100% util. 

IO, short of Input/Output, typically meaning the disk(s) and/or network. Unlike WD for "Windows Defender", rather than Western Digital, this is a common abbreviation. "IO bound" aka "IO limited" aka the speed of the disk is the limiting factor or the "bottleneck" in this case.

 

Meaning reading files from the disk in order to compare them to well known patterns is typically the limiting factor, not the speed of the CPU. If your CPU is running with 100% load on all cores during a scan, a CPU upgrade could help.

 

In any case, it doesn't change the fact that a GPU isn't really well suited for this kind of task.

[Lurking]

If you optimize Defender to use the GPU (if that is even possible), PCs with iGPU would be very slow. Every PC has a CPU, but not every PC has a power full dGPU. 

 

The CPU also would have to pass the data to GPU. Look at a chipset layout. The CPU directly accesses RAM, chipset (drives) and some PCIe SSD. The GPU would have to wait for the data to pass through the CPU. 

 

And as others pointed out, a GPU isn't good at general computing.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, Lurking said:

If you optimize Defender to use the GPU (if that is even possible), PCs with iGPU would be very slow. Every PC has a CPU, but not every PC has a power full dGPU. 

Im not sure I understand this. It would still have software and hardware accelerated data paths, it wouldnt slow down a PC. it would just accelerate on PCs with hardware accelerators. Also, what iGPU isnt competent for this in the last 10 years?

1 hour ago, Lurking said:

The CPU also would have to pass the data to GPU. Look at a chipset layout. The CPU directly accesses RAM, chipset (drives) and some PCIe SSD. The GPU would have to wait for the data to pass through the CPU. 

This is the actual issue from my understanding. Direct storage my help with this though. 

[flio]

Is your WD device connected via USB?