Question

Graphics processing units are incredibly powerful and can be used for more than just gaming. What are some of the ways a GPU can be used and why would you be able to use it that way (think computations)?

Answer 1

GPUs are very powerful because they have more cores than a typical CPU but each of these GPU cores runs at a lower frequency than a CPU core. GPUs utilize their cores to process data in parallel. This parallelism is unmatched by any CPU.

Some other uses of GPUs:

• Video editing: A video rendering requires massive processing power and GPUs can provide this power easily. For example, Adobe Premiere Pro uses GPUs to edit and render videos.
• Machine Learning: Machine Learning heavily uses GPU to train models against data sets. This can be done by CPUs but they will take much longer than a GPU.
• Cryptography: Some cryptographic algorithms require lots of computations, such as DES, AES, etc, to encode and decode data.
• Image processing: Applications for photo editing heavily uses GPUs. For example, Adobe Photoshop.
• Cyber-attack (Brute Force attack): GPUs are used to launch brute force attacks as a brute force attack needs to try out each and every combination and thus requires massive computation power as number of combinations are exponential.