[SOLVED] What's the difference between a gpu and cpu?

[billybobjoel]

Sorry this might be a noob question but what exactly is the difference between these two under the hood? Are things like a cpu specs being 2.x ghz quad core irrelevant if they have a gpu? Can normal PC functions use a GPU? Why or why not? Thanks!

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Most instructions are carried out by the CPU. Only graphics-intensive instructions are sent to the GPU. CPU specs are still relevant even with a GPU. The CPU still has to keep up with how much the GPU is doing.

 

[KhouhenStercie.Bacus]

Best answer right there with less paragraph and in English form!

 

[helper800]

Just for clarification, a CPU is the Central Processing Unit and handles 95% of tasks, and a GPU is the Graphics Processing Unit and handles visuals or animations. Processors have a CPU and generally, an integrated GPU called an iGPU.

 

[Metal Messiah.]

Both GPU nd CPU are required for any system to work in tandem....CPUs and GPUs have similar purposes but are optimized for different computing tasks. An efficient computer will need both to run properly. CPU feeds data to the GPU.

As you already know, The CPU (central processing unit) of a computer is often called the “brain” of a computer. It’s a collection of millions of transistors that can be manipulated to perform an awesome variety of calculations. A standard CPU has between one and four processing cores clocked anywhere from 1 to 4 GHz.

A CPU is powerful because it can do everything. If a computer is capable of accomplishing a task, it’s because the CPU can do it. Programmers achieve this through broad instruction sets and long feature lists shared by all CPUs.

A GPU is a specialized type of microprocessor. It’s optimized to display graphics and do very specific computational tasks. It runs at a lower clock speed than a CPU but has many times the number of processing CORES.

You can almost think of a GPU as a specialized CPU that’s been built for a very specific purpose.

Video rendering is all about doing simple mathematical operations over and over again, and that’s what a GPU is best at. A GPU will have thousands of processing cores running simultaneously. Each core, though slower than a CPU core, is tuned to be especially efficient at the basic mathematical operations required for video rendering. This massive parallelism is what makes GPUs capable of rendering the complex 3D graphics required by modern games.