They're really similar already. You can program a GPU much like you would a CPU (existence proof at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387267 https://news.y

They're really similar already. You can program a GPU much like you would a CPU (existence proof at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387267). There's a lot of obfuscation and hoarding of the ancient knowledge from the GPUs are special enthusiasts but the magic doesn't survive looking at the things. It's a masked vector isa. My dev GPU is a 6800XT. Cheapish gaming card from a little while ago, 16GB ram on the card. 72 "compute units" which are independent blocks of hardware containing memory ports, floating point unit, register file etc. Roughly "a core" from x64 world. Each of those can have up to 64 tasks ready to go, roughly a "hyperthread". It's 300W or so. There's some noise in the details, e.g. the size of the register file from the perspective of a hyperthread affects how many can be resident on the compute unit ready to run, the memory hierarchy has extra layers in it. The vector unit is 256byte wide as opposed to 64byte wide on x64. But if you wanted to run a web browser entirely on the GPU and were sufficiently bloody minded you'd get it done, with the CPU routing keyboard I/O to it and nothing else. If you want a process to sit on the GPU talking to the network and crunching numbers, don't need the x64 or arm host to do anything at all.