• Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    2 days ago

    I wouldn’t say a normal CPU is inefficient at graphics or cryptography, rather that a specialized GPU is particularly efficient at those tasks.

    We only consider a CPU slow at these tasks because of how much faster a GPU is with them, but we never see how much worse a GPU is at general conputation tasks, because of how stupendously bad it is.

    As soon as operations need to share info, the GPU speed advantage is gone. Branching paths bog a GPU down with redundant execution. Latency is quite poor too. And exceptions & interrupts are basically impossible at the system level. Trying to run normal programs on the GPU would be a disaster.