What is GPU and how does it work | GPU vs CPU

GPU is the term that is using in so many fields but most of the persons are not very familier with this term.

1. What is GPU?
2. How it is differ from CPU?
3. How to make AI/ML models without having GPU inside your machine?

GPU

GPU is an acronym and it stands for GRAPHIC PROCESSING UNIT. It is use for doing complex computation task that CPU can not do with ease. Nvidia and AMD are the two main gpu manufacturer of the world. It is a hardware device that is used to run applications having heavy graphics or 3D gaming etc.

GPU is made for doing efficient calculation on graphical information.

Working of a GPU

GPU has number of processing cores running on slow speed. This slow speed is actual very fast because every cores deals with two functions, pixels and vertices. That is how we do parallel processing by using GPU.

Vertex processing is done by co-ordinate system(x,y) and GPU does geometrical calculation to reproduce dimensional space on screen.

Pixel processing requires  more computational power than vertices processing.

How GPU is differ from CPU

CPU is made up with few number of cores like dual, quad, octa core and these core is the power to do any calculation or processing like start operating system, do any calculations, run any program or applications and other all task are done by cpu. 

On the other hand GPU has a hundreds of cores. So it works parallel means number of operations at a time while CPU does serial processing.

Suppose we have code having 1000 of instructions.

All instructions send to CPU for processing.

Instructions from 600 to 1000 are very complex and require some additional support. So  CPU can't process that instructions.

Then those instructions will send to the GPU for further processing.

USE of GPU

1. VDI ( Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) - GPUs are used to support high intensive graphic application.

examples - Movie Animation, Rendering, High resolution games etc.

2. Artificial intelligence - Two main subset of AI are machine learning and deep learning and GPUs are specifically created for these two purpose. Some GPUs are created to run Machine learning model ex - self driving car. Some GPUs are created to run neural networks model.

3. HPC ( High Performance Computing)

How to get GPU in your Machine 

We can use the facility of GPU in our machine by using cloud. 

Cloud is a platform where any one can store thier data and can do intensive computational work that they can't do in their machine. There are the following well known cloud Plateform - 

AWS cloud

IBM cloud 

GCP (Google Cloud platform)

Reasons for using GPU on cloud.

Every year new generation GPUs are coming and we can't change GPUs yearly as it will not very efficient. GPUs on cloud are maintained and time to time updated by the service provider. 

It is also very cost effective and load on our system is also reduced.

Thank you for reading this post.

If you have any doubts, let me know in the comment section.