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A comment on Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs.

Re:Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs by stonemetal on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @06:43PM (#5598455)
Why can't our GPUs be as powerful as our CPUs?

Simple, they make different tradeoffs to target different tasks. GPUs are horrible at code that is branch heavy, CPUs tend to be much better at that kind of code. GPUs make trade offs for fast memory access, ever hear of a GPU with 32GB ram? and vice versa.

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Re:Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs by drivers99 on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @07:08PM (#5598557)
I think it's also that there are so many cores. For example, there are 768 CUDA cores on a GTX 650 Ti.
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Re:Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs by chas on Wednesday April 24, 2013 @02:34AM (#5600195)
Right, they can fit so many cores on a chip because they are very optimized for one type of work (streaming vector math) and don't have things like branch-predictors that would make them good for general purpose work.
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