I wouldn't call it better because CPUs have a similar "sum and multiply" instruction, and GPUs are pretty much made of such units. The problem with bitshifting

I wouldn't call it better because CPUs have a similar "sum and multiply" instruction, and GPUs are pretty much made of such units. The problem with bitshifting is that it's just a special case of multiplication and division. So if you want your hardware utilized, you don't scale bitshifts, that'd be largely useless. You scale multiplication and division, and this is what modern hardware does. Bitshifting is very simple in terms of hardware, but scale beats simplicity.