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Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

Explore episode May 22, 2026
Technology
Why GPU cores are much smaller than CPU cores

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up · May 22, 2026 Technology

Most CPU die area goes to cache and branch predictor hardware — not ALUs. The branch predictor must guess a branch outcome 5 clock cycles before it's evaluated so the pipeline doesn't stall. GPUs strip out branch prediction and simplify register files, which is why you can fit thousands of GPU cores where a CPU has a hundred.

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Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores

At 1:11:10 · chapter starts 1:10:07

CPU cache is 100× faster than DDR but introduces non-deterministic latency. TPU scratchpad uses explicit software instructions for each memory tier, enabling deterministic latency. Groq and TPUs advertise this.

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