alt Hacker NewsWhen you dig through the CUDA developer docs instead of the promotional materials, you can develop a view of Nvidia GPUs as having 8-128 processing cores, each with 4 hyperthreads, running 32-lane SIMD for almost everything. Where a lane is 32 bits wide.
The promotional material likes to label the individual lanes as “cores” because it sounds more impressive. And, it’s not entirely incorrect.
Even the dev docs use the marketing terminology. The description I gave above needs a bit of piecing together.
This is a fantastic explanation, thanks for writing it. It also makes me wonder something: where exactly is the biggest difference between a 32-core x86 CPU (AVX512 basically being 16 32-bit lanes) and (say) an NVIDIA GPU with ~8-16 processing cores? Like why can't the CPU compete against a GPU like that for GPU-y tasks - or can it?