Don't laugh at my stupidity!

What is a GPU?

What is a CPU?

And last but not least. What is a Ram?

Google it :)

I tried doing that, but i didn't understand anything.

I know what they mean but im useless at explaining things.

it's a GPU CPU duct-taped together

edit

GPU = graphics processing unite it handles what you see on screen

CPU = computer processing unit the heart of the computer

motherbord is the backbone of the computer that links everything together

ram is the memory that stores data that need so be accessed fast

I'm a nood though

wait for the techies to teachy you up

btw you're not stupid if you don't know something that just means you don't know about it

I'm going to assume you're not just being funny - maybe I've missed some subtle sarcasm, I don't know.

A GPU is a "Graphical Processing Unit" - it's the part of the computer or console tasked with generating the graphics. It works in a way specifically tailored for graphical engines and drawing images on the screen. It includes what's called a "Frame Buffer", which is a memory space in which the pixels of each frame (single image sent to the TV screen or monitor) are inserted before being sent to the display itself.

A CPU is a "Central Processing Unit" - its task is to do more general computation. It's used to do everything else other than the graphics. It works in a more generic way, with instructions that are useful in a lot of different contexts.

There are variations of this - for instance, an APU is like a CPU and GPU combined, with components of both. A GPGPU is a GPU that has extra functionality so that it can do some things that are usually done by the CPU.

As you can probably guess, comparing systems when the GPU is stronger and the CPU is weaker, or vice versa, is difficult. Modern systems are likely to have one of the two capable of taking some of the load from the other, though. For instance, in the Wii U, the GPU is described as having GPGPU-type functionality to some degree - this means it can do some of the stuff a CPU would do, so the CPU can be less powerful without giving up overall capability.

RAM, which is written in capitals, stands for "Random Access Memory", and is where data in the computer is stored when it's going to be used for computations soon. It's faster to access than the hard drive (which is long-term data storage) or CDs/DVDs/etc. More RAM means that more computation can be done without having to pull information from the slower data storage formats. When the power goes out, RAM basically loses all of the information in it, which is why it's not used for long-term storage.

So the reason why the amount of RAM is significant in game consoles is that it allows the system to do things like hold more graphical textures, handle more characters and animations, etc. Too much, though, isn't particularly helpful, and very fast RAM (necessary for large amounts to be useful) can be quite expensive. So it's a balancing act, of sorts.

I could explain but really, this would take several minutes and still would be incomplete...
I try a short version:

CPU - calculates stuff. doesn't know what because dumb :) gets data to compute from external data .hard-drive, odd, and so on. read: from cpu-point, external storage but i will explain more in the ram-part. so cpu gets data, calculates, sends data back. therefore it has an alu (arithmetic logical unit) which does things like addition, subtraction and so on with integers. if it has to calculate real numbers it uses an fpu but it is inside the cpu nowadays.

GPU - formerly known as "graphics card". purpose is to produce signals that are sent to your monitor. few years back this was its main purpose, nowadays they act more like a cpu - they have a lot of dedicated alus thus can compute a lot of data in parallel but the instructions available are very limited compared to cpu. but cpus can offload tasks to gpus nowadays. the main purpose for all the alus is 3d-graphics nowadays - producing 3d is intensively math and calculating.

RAM - well, for itself, RAM is just arbitrary memory and mostly transparent to CPU (leave aside DMA for better understanding). so, the cpu is to calculate stuff. it needs to get data fast, calculates fast and wants to get rid of the data fast. so think of getting the data from a hard-disk - the hard-disk is *magnitudes* slower than what the cpu can handle. so it makes sense to implement data-storage between the two mentioned parts. the first one is 1st-lvl-cache. the processor can get data from there very fast and write back very fast (i leave registers aside here on purpose). so why not implement just cache? easy, way too expensive so it is relatively small. so what happens if the 1st-level-cache doesn't have the neccessary data? it has to get its data from memory that is bigger but sadly slower than 1st-level-cache. nowadays this is 2nd-level-cache. and if the data is not found there (it's called a cache-miss) data has to transferred for ram which even slower but way bigger than the caches. so basically ram is some sort of cache if you get the idea. remember the cpu is still waiting for data! and in the worst case the ram has to be filled with data from where it really resides, meaning hdd or ssd. the waiting process for the cpu is called "io wait" and it happens so often that it's surprising that i always wondered why this problem was not adressed way earlier.
this is also the reason why computers with ssd are "felt" to be much faster, although they aren't in real. it is just that the data-bottleneck is less worse.

i hope it was short enough to understand...

edit: see this image for data-speed:

It's worth adding that CPUs generally excel in integer arithmetic (numbers that do not have decimal points. The earlier 80x86 CPUs had a co-processor that handled floating point arithmetic, which was designated an 80x87)

GPUs excel in floating point arithmetic (numbers that are decimal mainly, usually between 0 and 1), and given their high parallel computing capabilities, it's very handy for Matrix multiplication (which is what is used to transform polygons within the GPU). The GPU also comes with other things specific to getting it from numbers to screen pixels, such as vertex and pixel shaders (think of them as a programmable device within the GPU that lets you add additional effects before it's output to screen).

I said that CPU' ALU calculates integers and an fpu, nowadays integrated in the CPU, calculates floats. We want to help the author to understand, not be picky about details as this would be too complex and wouldn't help understanding.

Too complex? You're explaining caches when he is asking about RAM. Cache is purely performance gain, there's nothing fundamental about it. I think my explanations didn't even hit that kind of level.

You mentioned that the GPU is like a CPU, whereas it's more like a massively parallel FPU.

Also, memory is not just another jump from cache. The purpose of cache is to be transparent to everything. Programmers cannot access the cache, whereas memory is manually manipulated through computer programs.