Timeline for Are there any benefits for using the CPU instead of the GPU?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Sep 12, 2011 at 17:37 | comment | added | Pablo Ariel | I'm sure they still do a lot of linear processing in the underlying architecture. From the programming side it takes just an instruction to the GPU but the cores don't execute exactly in parallel because of their dependence on other hardware wich is not parallel such as reading from memory, probably the GPU can provide data to a single core at a time. | |
| Sep 11, 2011 at 21:02 | history | edited | Kylotan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
punctuation!
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| Sep 10, 2011 at 20:35 | comment | added | Kylotan | @Randolf: CPUs have different instructions and registers that deal with different low level data types (eg. signed vs. unsigned, integral vs. floating point). This is the case on 8086 and indeed most modern architectures, and it doesn't come entirely for free. | |
| Sep 10, 2011 at 16:25 | comment | added | Randolf Richardson | The analogy about the aeroplane is a very good one (+1), but with regard to CPUs supporting different data types that's actually more of a higher-level-language concept as CPUs (at least in the Intel space) tend to just deal with data in very basic forms (e.g., bits, bytes, words, dwords, etc.). There are some tight-loop instructions to scan or copy data that is terminated with a zero byte, but the data in these instances isn't really recognized by the CPU as being a particular type (other than being a zero-terminated chunk of data in the context of these loops). | |
| Sep 10, 2011 at 15:30 | history | answered | Kylotan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |