this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So when will CPUs integrate the hardware necessary to compete with GPUs on these tasks? This situation is ridiculous, the device designed for this isn't able to keep up with the device designed for something else entirely

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You are looking at it wrong by taking the names too literally. GPUs are simply processing units optimized for parallel computation and CPUs processing units optimized for general purpose sequential computation. And these optimizations require architectural trade-offs, so to be efficient at both types you'll need to have both a CPU and GPU.

So think of it this way, a CPU is actually a General-purpose Sequential Processing Unit and a GPU is a Parallel Processing Unit, but renaming them would only add to the confusion.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

GPUs are a lot closer to AI processors (tensor cores and similar) than CPUs. Graphics processing is about doing lots of simple computations simultaneously, which is what AI does - lots and lots of matrix maths. CPUs are more general purpose but can't compete on raw speed because of this (and some of the hacks to try to get more speed are causing security problems).