what is the best resource for understanding why GPU is more powerful than CPU.

Question

I was reading this site:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_what_is.html

and I wanted to find out some more generic information on the ideas behind GPU computing (including the history on using this for computation and benefits over using CPUs)

Does anyone have any good articles that are not too difficult to digest?

Answer 1

You can find the architecture of the gpu in this document (CUDA programming guide): How the processing units are organised and what instructions you can use:

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/2_3/toolkit/docs/NVIDIA_CUDA_Programming_Guide_2.3.pdf

Here are some more about CUDA:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_develop.html

Here you can find general information about gpgpu:

GPGPU: http://gpgpu.org/

Answer 2

I personally find the GPGPU Wikipedia Entry quite instructive.

Answer 3

This is a good place to start.

I think the white paper on Fermi is a good read too.

Answer 4

This presentation on parallel computing is great, and I think it will help you understand GPU computing benefits:

http://newport.eecs.uci.edu/~sjenks/Presentations/Ubiquitous%20Parallel%20Computing.pdf

It goes over CPUs vs GPUs, including a discussion on CUDA and OpenCL.