GPU vs. CPU Computing

“Graphics processing units (GPUs) have, for many years, powered
the display of images and motion on computer displays. GPUs are now
powerful enough to do more than just move images across the screen.
They are capable of performing high-end computations that are the
staple of many engineering activities.

“Benchmarks that focus on floating point arithmetic, those most
often used in these engineering computations, show that GPUs can
perform such computations much faster than the traditional central
processing units (CPUs) used in today’s
workstations—sometimes as much as 20 times faster, depending
on the computation.

“But the performance advantage in these benchmarks doesn’t
automatically make it a slam dunk for running engineering
applications. Comparing CPUs with GPUs is like comparing apples
with oranges.”

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