The language, architecture and even general philosophy of a CPU and a GPU are radically different, so it is intriguing to see them performing the same task. Here, two wildly different kinds of computers are producing exactly the same result.
To anyone looking at the two images below, they seem to be the same. But a programmer reading the corresponding code will see two clearly distinct programs.
In one case, the program is optimizing for the massive parallel pipeline capability of a GPU. In the other case, the program relies on the flexibility of programming in Javascript on a CPU. For example, on the CPU there is no built in normalize function to set a vector length to one. But it takes just a single line of Javascript code to derive such a function from a dot product:
From the perspective of a computer graphics designer, having the same noise function on both the CPU and GPU means that the designer is free to go back and forth between the two environments when creating noise-based models. You can choose to implement one part of your design to run on the CPU and another part to run on the GPU, and the results will match.
More tomorrow.