What is the difference among CPU, GPU, APU, FPGA, DSP, and Intel MIC?

CPU

CPU is a general purpose processor. General Purpose in the sense that it is designed to perform a number of operations but the way these operations are performed may not be best for all applications. Graphics or Video Processing is one such example. Although a CPU can perform these tasks (which involve repeated additions/multiplications which may be performed in parallel) , the performance achieved is not good enough for modern applications.

GPU

Graphics processing Unit or GPU is designed to accelerate creation of images for a computer display. A CPU consists of a few cores optimized for sequential serial processing while a GPU consists of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for handling multiple tasks simultaneously. They are designed to perform functions such as texture mapping, image rotation, translation, shading, etc. They may also support operations such as motion compensation, calculation of inverse DCT, etc. for accelerated video decoding.

Intel MIC

Intel Many Integrated Core or Intel MIC Architecture combines many Intel cores onto a single chip. Unlike its competitor in HPC market, NVidia TESLA GPU, it provides up to 61 cores. One of the key advantages that Intel MIC offers over NVidia GPUs is that it runs same instruction set as 64-bit Pentium. Standard C, C++ can be used for writing source codes to program these cores.

APU

APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit which refers to the main processor of system which has additional functionality for accelerating execution of certain operations. This additional capability may be provided by an on chip graphics processing unit. In simple terms APU is CPU + GPU on a single chip.

DSP

Digital Signal Processor or DSP is optimized for high speed processing of numeric data representing the analog signals in real time. They are designed for quickly performing large number of numeric operations repeatedly on a series of data samples and are ideal for processing streaming digital signals. They provide functionalities that are helpful for DSP applications such as bit reverse addressing which is helpful for FFT computation, architectural support for very tight extremely low overhead loops, saturation arithmetic, etc.

FPGA

An FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is entirely different from CPU, GPU, DSP, etc. in the sense that it is not a processor in itself i.e. it does not run a program stored in the program memory. In layman’s terms, an FPGA is nothing but a bulk of reconfigurable digital logic suspended in a sea of programmable inter-connects. A typical FPGA may also have dedicated memory blocks, digital clock manager, IO banks and several other features which vary across different vendors and models. Since they can be configured after manufacturing at costumer’s end, they can be used to implement any logic function (including but not limited to a processor core). This makes them ideal for re-configurable computing and application specific processing. Intel has recently announced a new range of Xeon Processors with integrated FPGA so that each chip can be configured at run type depending upon application needs.