Reads shorter than 64 bytes on a CPU all cost you the same: a packet of 64 bytes on the memory bus, because that's the atom size of modern CPU's DDR4 memory con

Reads shorter than 64 bytes on a CPU all cost you the same: a packet of 64 bytes on the memory bus, because that's the atom size of modern CPU's DDR4 memory controllers... On GPUs the atom size is 32/64 bytes. So GPUs are always better than or equal to CPUs when it comes to small reads/writes. It's true that the compute power of ethash is not negligible, but to give you one more data point: on equihash there is even less compute spent on hashing, and GPUs still dominate CPUs