Irrelevant for you does not mean irrelevant for others
replyNails and hammers are great but most of us have moved on to screws and screwdrivers.
replyWhat good does it do to stick your head in the sand?
CPUs are great for orchestrating work, GPUs are great for actually doing the work.
Screws have been around for about 3 millennia at this point. They have patently failed to obviate the use of nails. So by this analogy we can expect the 'Only GPUs do the work.' believers to be still promising this, any day now, about three thousand years hence. (-:
reply>CPUs are great for orchestrating work
replyRight, and wouldn't it be really nice if we could check on our orchestrators to make sure their not bottlenecking ops?
"How come we can fully load the GPUs?" "Idk boss, amelius said htop et al were irrelevant so we can't really investigate"
Did you write this comment using your gpu?
reply>"What good does it do to stick your head in the sand?"
replyGet the fuck out. I do write for GPU as well. One does not replace the other.
For high performance work, gpus have replaced cpus a long time ago.
replyThere is plenty of "high performance work" that still requires CPUs.
replyNot for all definitions of HPC, though.
replyNo one's doing database management on GPUs. No one's scraping data on GPUs. Can't run VMs on GPUs. Can't run web servers on GPU...
It is sunny in my backyard now. Must be sunny everywhere else
reply> Nowadays most of my processing happens on the GPU, so htop/top better evolve or become mostly irrelevant
replyIf you’re a 3D rendering designer, an ML engineer or a crypto bro, then sure.
Here are the common workloads (for the average SWE on HN) that use CPU/RAM:
- compilation/builds
- language servers and IDEs
- test suites
- local containers
- local databases
- node tooling
- browsers
- data processing
- compression and encryption
- searching/indexing
And your browser for instance might crash, if it runs out of gpu memory, which will surprise you if you only look for cpu/ram.
reply(Happened to me)