Zironic t1_j6nzase wrote
Reply to comment by Thrawn89 in ELI5: Why do computers need GPUs (integrated or external)? What information is the CPU sending to the GPU that it can't just send to a display? by WeirdGamerAidan
>It sounds like you're discussing vector processing instruction set with 512 bits which are very much specialized for certain tasks such as memcpy and not much else? That's just an example of a small SIMD on the CPU.
The vector instruction set is primarily for floating point math but also does integer math. It's only specialized for certain tasks in so far those certain tasks are SIMD, it takes advantage of the fact that doing a math operation across the entire memory of the CPU is as fast as doing it on just a single word.
In practice most programs don't lend themselves to vectorisation so it's mostly used for physics simulations and the like.
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