Comment by fulafel
11 hours ago
GPUs having have thousands of cores is just a silly marketing newspeak.
They rebranded SIMD lanes "cores". For eaxmple Nvidia 5000 series GPUs have 50-170 SMs which are the equivalent of cpu cores there. So a more than desktops, less than bigger server CPUs. By this math each avx-512 cpu core has 16-64 "gpu cores".
170 compute units is still a crapload of em for a non-server platform with non-server platform requirements. so the broad "lots of cores" point is still true, just highly overstated as you said. plus those cores are running the equivalent of n-way SMT processing, which gives you an even higher crapload of logical threads. AND these logical threads can also access very wide SIMD when relevant, which even early Intel E-cores couldn't. All of that absolutely matters.
Each SM can typically schedule 4 warps so it’s more like 400 “cores” each with 1024-bit SIMD instructions. If you look at it this way, they clearly outclass CPU architectures.