CPUs can’t do that, but legacy is irrelevant. They just don’t have enough parallelism to leverage all these extra transistors. Let’s compare the 486 with a modern GPU.
Intel 80486 with 1.2M transistors delivered 0.128 flops / cycle.
nVidia 4070 Ti Super with 45.9B transistors delivers 16896 flops / cycle.
As you see, each transistor became 3.45 times more efficient at delivering these FLOPs per cycle.
Intel 80486 with 1.2M transistors delivered 0.128 flops / cycle.
nVidia 4070 Ti Super with 45.9B transistors delivers 16896 flops / cycle.
As you see, each transistor became 3.45 times more efficient at delivering these FLOPs per cycle.