From the course: Programming Foundations: Inside Computing Hardware
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Parallel processing: The CPU and GPU
From the course: Programming Foundations: Inside Computing Hardware
Parallel processing: The CPU and GPU
- [Instructor] Parallel processing is a type of multitasking. This is when a computer uses multiple processing units or cores within a single processor to execute different task simultaneously. That means many operations happening at the same time. This significantly improves the time, speed, and efficiency of complex computations, or when managing large volume of data. Parallel processing can be performed using central processing units or graphics processing units. Modern CPUs usually have multiple cores like dual core, quad core, octa core, and even up to 64 cores in some high-end processors, meaning they can perform multiple instructions at the same time, a form of parallel processing. Here's an example of a CPU from Intel showing the number of cores to be 24. Here is another example of a CPU from AMD and it has 64 cores. The graphics processing units or GPUs are also specialized for parallel processing. They can…
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