Too Long; Didn't Read
Is GPU Really Necessary for Data Science Work? Is it really necessary? Can't we use a cluster of cheap machines, as we do with Bigdata? The simplest and most direct answer is: YES, GPUs are needed to train models and nothing will replace them. However, you have to program properly in order to get the best out of using GPU, and not all libraries and frameworks do this efficiently. The CUDA programming interface is made in C, but there are bindings for Python, like PyCuda and for Java, like JCuda.