GPU, a vectorial and parallel architecture
GPUs provide an incredible processing power in certain situations. If you ever tried to program a software rasterizer for your CPU, you would have noticed that the performance was terrible. Even the most advanced software rasterizer, taking advantage of vectorial instruction sets such as SSE3, or making intensive use of all available cores through multithreading, offers very poor performance compared with a GPU. CPUs are simply not meant for pixels.
So, why are GPUs so fast at processing fragments, pixels, and vertices compared to a CPU? The answer is that by the scalar nature of a CPU, it always process one instruction after another. On the other side, GPUs process hundreds of instructions simultaneously. ...
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