CPU vs GPU what are the differences between them

[zak rooley]

Why are gpus used for research level tasks rather than cpus?

I understand that gpus have a lot more cores than a cpu and I'm assuming that because of that it can deal with many smaller tasks at once. My next question would be why do we need cpus anymore if graphics cards are so powerful/why don't cpus have more cores?The layout of this is abit broken probably as I am writing this on my phone and will fix it also didn't linus do a video on CPU vs GPU

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[racer243l]

3 minutes ago, zak rooley said:

Why are gpus used for research level tasks rather than cpus?

I understand that gpus have a lot more cores than a cpu and I'm assuming that because of that it can deal with many smaller tasks at once. My next question would be why do we need cpus anymore if graphics cards are so powerful/why don't cpus have more cores?The layout of this is abit broken probably as I am writing this on my phone and will fix it also didn't linus do a video on CPU vs GPU

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think he made one a long time ago about bitcoin and litecoin mining. In this video he explains why. I will try to find it.

[Godlygamer23]

CPUs are better for generalized tasks. I also believe CPUs have access to more instruction sets than GPUs.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Being able to perform certain tasks faster than others doesn't mean that they're better/faster overall. GPUs are fundamentally designed to process graphical information, and they can do some scientific calculations faster than some CPUs. If you compare a CPU core to a GPU core, the differences are pretty huge. GPU cores run much slower and are generally weaker than CPU cores if you compare them 1:1. If you consider that modern GPUs have 2000+ cores, then look at the size of the GPU chip compared to a CPU, you can get a good idea for how much smaller they are compared to CPU cores. 

There's a difference in architecture between CPUs and GPUs that dictates what kind of processes each processing unit can run. GPUs simply can't handle many logical processes that CPUs need to in order to run the system correctly. A CPU can handle single streams of complex operations, while a GPU is more adept at handling multiple streams of simple operations. Often the loads that a GPU is better at involves heavy loads of graphical or physics simulations. 

Things like interrupts and virtual memory are essential to run modern operating systems, but GPUs lack these features. With the amount of existing software and development in x86, it would be extremely difficult to either switch GPU hardware into compatible configurations, or to do a huge software swap to be compatible with GPU programming techniques.