Battle of the Latest Streamers! Apple vs. Amazon and Roku

[Geek-9pm]

Apple and Amazon have announced new video streaming devices and services.
And what about Rouku and Nvidia Shield?
This is going to be fun for the whole family!
Sorty source Title:
Roku 4 vs. Apple TV vs. Amazon Fire TV vs. Nvidia Shield: Battle of the Latest Streamers!
(October 17, 2015)
Story from Day Harald.

The Roku 4 triumphs in the fact that it can handle 4K Ultra HD videos and support frame rates up to 60fps. This is quite an impressive feature right now. You will notice that most of the 4K TV sets can support 60fps due to the presence of an HDMI 2.0 port.

 

Nvidia Shield, on the other hand has an Nvidia Tegra X1 processor w/256-core Maxwell GPU, uses Android TV OS and comes with 3GB of memory. Output resolutions and connectivity features are same as Amazon Fire

Is that a type? 256 core?

[Calum]

It's not a 256-core processor but a 256-core GPU - not really "cores" as such but that's how graphics cards are made up, they have a large amount of "cores".  A typical high-end card could have 2000 or more.

[Geek-9pm]

Thanks for the clarification.
So.. this leads to the question,
Why even have a CPU? Why not just let the GPUs do the work?
Oops. That would be off topic. Sorry. 

[Calum]

Broadly speaking, GPUs are designed for one thing, CPUs are more general-purpose.  GPUs can't run an operating system, they can be used to display graphics and to accelerate some tasks.  Before you mention it - yes, GPU computing does exist, but the uses for it are quite specific, you can't just throw, say, an operating system, media player, or word processor at a GPU and say "process that" - it doesn't work that way.