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Just to be fair: as also stated at the beginning of the post, CPUs are far more complex nowadays than they represent themselves to the outside.

They don't work like a von-Neumann machine, they act like one. Granted, we know a lot more about the inner workings of modern CPUs thn GPUs, but a lot of real-life work still assumes that the CPU works "as-if" it was a computer from the 70s, just really, really fast.

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A lot of effort goes into CPU design to ensure you don't have to care, unlike GPUs.

Is that really a smart choice, given that we have compilers that can deal with the gory details?

Relying on the compiler to compensate for an unwieldy instruction set architecture is something that was tried explicitly with the Intel Itanium and failed hard.

\rant I feel that generally people often have a notion of the "compiler is unbeatable at optimizing", which is completely false: You can always start from compiler output when optimizing and you often have easy options that are inaccessible for the compiler because of language semantics/calling conventions etc. (=> but hand optimizing at instruction level is time consuming, time is expensive, and what the compiler does is basically free ;).

Compilers can absolutely not deal with the complexity of GPUs.

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