Re:AMD Lists Threadripper 3000 CPU with 32 Cores, Possible N...
by strangenessak on Thursday October 17, 2019 @07:34AM
(#21280912)
> GPUs have hundreds to thousands of cores
That's not exactly true. The GPU equivalent of a CPU core is called a Streaming Multiprocessor (in NVIDIA language), and it's latest GPU, GTX 2080 has 72 of them.
Each of these SMs can run hundreds of threads, but they run the same code in lock-step.
Re:AMD Lists Threadripper 3000 CPU with 32 Cores, Possible N...
by frankling_ on Thursday October 17, 2019 @05:09PM
(#21286383)
That has never been true: on NVIDIA hardware the 32 threads of each Warp run in lockstep, certainly not all threads. And starting with Volta, each thread even got its own program counter and call stack.
There are many, many useful tasks which are embarassingly parallel or nearly so. For those tasks, doubling the core count doubles the performance. Single core gains have stagnated, so a performance doubling is a huge win. There's no other way to just up and double performance for any class of problem.
And even outside those tasks, more cores means more simultaneous heterogeneous workload, which means deeper and richer information pipelines. If you're live editing audio or video, for example, your core count determines the number of plugins/tracks you can work with simultaneously - and it's not unusual to have hundreds of tracks and dozens of layered plugins.