Overview of CPU and GPGPU Technologies for Server and AI Applications

The piece begins by highlighting the rapid advancement of China's "Xinchuang" (information technology innovation) initiative, emphasizing that chips are the core of the industry and that domestic substitution demand is strong across hardware, software, applications, and information security.

It then explains the fundamentals of CPUs, describing them as the control and execution core of computers, composed of control units, arithmetic logic units, and registers, and outlines the distinction between complex instruction set (CISC) and reduced instruction set (RISC) architectures, noting that x86 represents CISC while ARM, MIPS, and Alpha are examples of RISC.

The article notes that x86 remains the dominant architecture in the server market, accounting for over 90% of sales revenue and more than 97% of unit shipments, with IDC data showing 2020 global x86 server sales of $82.65 billion and projected growth to 10.66 million units in China by 2025.

It proceeds to discuss GPGPU (general‑purpose graphics processing units) as a co‑processor that assists CPUs in non‑graphics workloads, detailing the two branches of GPU development: traditional graphics‑oriented GPUs and general‑purpose GPUs that add vector, tensor, and matrix instructions for high‑performance parallel computation.

GPGPUs are identified as the primary accelerator for artificial intelligence, widely used in cloud‑based model training, big‑data processing, and emerging fields such as smart factories, autonomous driving, and smart cities, with market forecasts indicating rapid expansion of data‑center workloads.

The article outlines future trends: increasing compute density and bandwidth for GPGPUs, the rise of GPGPU as the mainstream accelerator compared to ASIC and FPGA, and the growing importance of heterogeneous CPU‑GPGPU architectures that combine the strengths of each for complex, parallel workloads.

Finally, the source notes that the information is adapted from "Intelligent Computing Chip World" and includes references to additional resources and promotional material.