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CPU vs GPU: same two chips, different work

Left: 4 big, powerful CPU cores. Right: a grid of 256 tiny GPU cores. Pick a workload and press run. Watch which chip wins — and notice the only thing that changed is the shape of the work.

Workload:

CPU 0.0s

4 powerful cores · great at heavy, sequential work

GPU 0.0s

256 tiny cores · great at floods of identical work

Model (simplified): a CPU core is ~20× faster at a single task than a GPU core, but there are only 4 of them. The GPU has 256 slow cores. For 4 heavy tasks, the fast CPU cores win and most GPU cores sit idle. For thousands of tiny tasks, the GPU's sheer width overwhelms the 4 CPU cores — that's throughput. This is why you match the chip to the shape of the work.