Quad Core vs. Hexacore

[Cilus]

Asigh is right abt the GPU processing thing. But till date Stream processors of a GPU do not support complex instruction sets. For example finding square root of a number can be performed by a single instruction in CPU, but not possible in GPU. What is the most advantage of GPU processing is it can perform a simple operation, say a color invert operation in very very large number of elements simultaneously. It mainly works in vectorized way.

For example you are performing an operation X=X+2 over 1 million values of X. Here CPU will execute it sequentially, although use of SIMD instruction set will increase the performance, whereas a GPU will perform the same operation over the 1 million element as a vectorized unit. So a single GPU cycle will be required to perform this operation over all X.

 

[Cool Buddy]

Why would you say that present day software(s) are not capable of processing a thread at the same time. It does not make sense.

I didn't say anything like that, which line are you referring to?

One thread is an instruction cycle, it cannot be broken up into two parts and handed off to separate cores. Yes, if the application is multi threaded (which is quite easy to do these days), then 'n' threads can be passed of to the next thread queue or if a core is sitting idle.

I did say there are a lot of multi-threaded apps these days

Also GPUs can perform calculations. And they perform them to great floating point levels. How you think pixels are rendered with the angle to the viewer. They follow extreme parallelism using SIMD logic.

I didn't say they do not perform calculations, but they do not perform all types of calculations like CPUs, only specific types of calculations

Once can invest in a lower end GPU if not gaming, but a GPU is not at all mandatory. I have a ATI FirePRO at my office, and it does jack...! Most of my work is on programming IDEs and SQL RDBMS system, so I can easily do without a GPU. Hardly a requirement.

Finally, your knowledge is technical, while my knowledge comes purely from a general interest in computers. I can never match you. So thanks for the insight on GPUs, I like feedback on my posts. That helps me increase my knowledge, that's the reason I come to this forum. Hope you understand why I go wrong sometimes. (lack of knowledge about technical terms)