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by neogodless 1698 days ago
Tensor has a 20-core GPU.

Are cores the main thing to count? So that's better than an M1 Pro with a measly 16-cores?

/s

2 comments

It's 4 more. How could less be more? More is more!
Not sure why the /s? Cores are the main thing for GPU's right?
No, because there's no definition of a "GPU core". Vendors just pick a random layer of their GPU and call it a core. Whether or not it makes any sense as being called a "core" or being comparable in any way isn't a goal of anyone's.

Really they aren't even comparable across a single vendor (the capabilities of a single "SP" on an Nvidia GPU has drastically shifted over the years - and not always in the "more capable" direction)

At best you can roughly compare GPUs from the same generation from the same family (eg, M1 Pro vs. M1 Max). But that's about it, and even that can be deceptive (most commonly in desktop GPUs where other differences can drastically alter scaling across differing "core" counts)

As others have said, core is not a well defined term at all in computer architecture.

Is a core something that has its own program counter? Does it need its own floating point unit to count as a core? What about cores that only do a few ops? Are the cores even all the same, or do they have access to the same resources? For example, a few older Nvidia GPUS have some portion of their cores that have only a single crossbar port, and so perform much worse.

The M1 gpu core could very well be equivalent or better than 16 tensor soc cores internally.

Yes - critically, though, a Tensor core and an M1 GPU core are not equal or directly comparable.