CPU vs gpu clock speed

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Forgive my hardware ignorance. But why does a high end AMD CPU run at 5ghz whereas a high end AMD GPU runs at 1ghz? Why is it so much slower and Why can't you use a CPU as a gpu?
 
The differences are a lot greater than simply clock speed. The GPU is designed to do a few things well, whereas the CPU can do a lot more.

This analogy is quite good, taken from here

One way to visualize it is a CPU works like a small group of very smart people who can quickly do any task given to them. A GPU is a large group of relatively dumb people who aren't individually very fast or smart, but who can be trained to do repetitive tasks, and collectively can be more productive just due to the sheer number of people.
 
The differences are a lot greater than simply clock speed. The GPU is designed to do a few things well, whereas the CPU can do a lot more.

This analogy is quite good, taken from here

One way to visualize it is a CPU works like a small group of very smart people who can quickly do any task given to them. A GPU is a large group of relatively dumb people who aren't individually very fast or smart, but who can be trained to do repetitive tasks, and collectively can be more productive just due to the sheer number of people.

Very nice explanation. Thanks. It does raise another question in my head though... If CPU's are so much "better" than GPUs. Why are GPU's more expensive?
 
With a gpu its not just the chip you are buying its all the circuitry round it too and that all costs development. Gpus sre also more complex.

Factor in nvidia for instance is relatively small compared to Intel and costs then scale also.
 
As Varkanoid said, when you buy a CPU you're just buying the chip itself. When you buy a GPU, you're in effect buying the chip, memory, cooler and motherboard all in one.
 
There's also a matter of scale as well...

A Radeon 390X has 2,816 stream processors.
A Intel i7 4770K has 4 cores.

GPUs are much cheaper than CPUs if you only want one with 400 stream processors.
 
think of manufacturing cost much to do with of Die size, and transliterates.


the i7 skylake is 122mm^2 - maybe 1.5-1.6 billion transistors (cant find a source)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9582/intel-skylake-mobile-desktop-launch-architecture-analysis

the nivdia 980ti is ~600mm^2 and 8+ million transistors

these transistors all need to be designed and go through many complex stages of simulation before you get a shiny new gpu. remember most designs take over 2-3 year process and we only get to see/here them towards the last 6 months.

even now Nvidia/amd will be starting internal planning for at least the next 2 gpu/cpu generations :)

Dan
 
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Very nice explanation. Thanks. It does raise another question in my head though... If CPU's are so much "better" than GPUs. Why are GPU's more expensive?

Quite the reverse, GPUs are massively more powerful. CPUs are easy to program for as most tasks are easily broken down into a series of steps, GPUs are very hard to program for as to make good use of them you need many things to be worked on at once.

CPUs are as a result easy to use for a broad range of tasks, while GPUs only excel at some - but when they do they are orders of magnitude faster. Many projects aim to rewrite computationally intensive problems to run on GPUs instead.

Forget clock speed, it's literally just a number. You can't compare two different products by clock speed unless they are the same in every other way. So two different AMD GPUs can't be compared with it, nor can they be compared with any NVIDIA GPUs nor any CPUs etc. Two AMD 390s can be compared, though even then there are other factors like power limit, cooling, vRAM speed, vRAM timings beyond just core clock speed (without even thinking about the rest of the system they're sitting in).
 
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