A world: GPUs get used to speed up installs of software / OS

Strange shower thought almost?

Why is it that when installing OS and software the only thing that is used is the CPU and memory, Why do developers not use any available power on GPUs?

Or am I thinking about this the wrong way :)?

Regards,

Ult

Short answer: because the GPU is not good at that task, and it would not offload the CPU in any meaningful way.

When installing you are only moving stuff from place A to place B, and unzipping files. The unzipping part is what takes all that CPU as the bottleneck otherwise is how fast you can write to the drive - and it’s usually not fast at all.

So the question you’re asking is more akin to “Why isn’t Eve at accounting helping with this engineering problem? She’s read so much math, she’d be an ace at it!” - No, it takes much more than math skills to be a good engineer, and while Eve could be a great engineer after some training she’d be really lousy at it to start with. :stuck_out_tongue: Of course, the GPU cannot even be trained, so…

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To elaborate a bit more on what wertigon already said GPUs are engineered to perform small calculations at a very high speed. This is useful for graphics because it mostly relies on geometric calculations.
That’s why a GPU core can have many other cores that do just simple math (single and double precision) and that’s about it.

Crunching simple mathematical operations at high speed unfortunately it’s not really useful when installing an OS. Furthermore a GPU would be seriously bottlenecked if it had to work on system memory on an OS installation or had to move files from it’s RAM to system memory.

Last but not least OS makers know that 90% of their user base installs an OS very rarely (people mostly buy prebuilts and laptops where the OS is already installed) so spending 5 more minutes looking at loading screens is no big deal and I agree on that. Wouldn’t be monetarily worth for them to go through the hassle of implementing GPU in the mix.

Another reason I just thought about is reliability: adding more complexity to an installation might make it harder to be stable, which might make installing an OS need more attempts increasing frustration and fear in the average joe.

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With modern pci-e 3 or 4 and fast usb drives most os installs are insanely fast even by standards from few years ago. Reminds me to put a windows installer on my portable nvme drive . Just to see

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