Nvidia CUDA

CPU vs. GPU

All computers have a CPU, the main component that does most of the work. It runs our Python code, for example. We can think of it as the brains of our computer. CPU stands for central processing unit, but nobody really thinks about those words anymore. CPUs are designed to be general-purpose, and good at many different kinds of tasks.

Those graphics cards we mentioned earlier contain a GPU, or graphics processing unit. Unlike a general-purpose CPU, a GPU is designed to perform specific tasks and do them well. One of those tasks is to carry out arithmetic, including matrix multiplication, in a highly parallel way.

The following picture illustrates this key difference between a CPU and a GPU.