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This comic hung in my office for years (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I think this depends on how you define "general purpose".

The CPU is a "general purpose" processor but it's not very efficient at graphics or cryptography tasks.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year 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.

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