What are compute units?

[Carlos1010]

Hello everyone!

So I was reading an article earlier this day about the PS4 NEO and it said it will have 36 compute units but I have no clue what they are. After looking as AMD ans NVIDIA I saw that they have it too. So my question is what are compute units and what do they mean? I mean are they like parts of the GPU or something? Thanks in advanced!

[Godlygamer23]

They consist of clusters of stream processors and other components.

[TheRandomness]

They are units that do computing c;

It's like a core in your CPU, essentially (methinks, correct me if wrong)

[NumLock21]

They are units that compute

[Carlos1010]

4 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

They consist of clusters of stream processors and other components.

Are they for GPU or CPU and also how many are needed for gamers?

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, Carlos1010 said:

Are they for GPU or CPU and also how many are needed for gamers?

They're for GPUs. Yes, they allow the GPU to complete computations needed in video games.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Carlos1010 said:

Are they for GPU or CPU and also how many are needed for gamers?

They're for the GPU. The more you have, the faster your performance.

 

As for another explanation of this:

 

AMD and NVIDIA GPUs today are built up of small tiny CPUs called shader processors. They group them up into units that are controlled by a single entity. For AMD, they call these compute units. A compute unit I believe comprises of 32 shaders.