[stonemetal]

Why can't our GPUs be as powerful as our CPUs?

Simple, they make different tradeoffs to target different tasks. GPUs are horrible at code that is branch heavy, CPUs tend to be much better at that kind of code. GPUs make trade offs for fast memory access, ever hear of a GPU with 32GB ram? and vice versa.

[drivers99]

I think it's also that there are so many cores. For example, there are 768 CUDA cores on a GTX 650 Ti.

[chas]

Right, they can fit so many cores on a chip because they are very optimized for one type of work (streaming vector math) and don't have things like branch-predictors that would make them good for general purpose work.