The Target Side
The target side of GDB is the “bits and bytes manipulator”. Although it may make reference to symbolic info here and there, most of the target side will run with only a stripped executable available—or even no executable at all, in remote debugging cases.
Operations such as disassembly, stack frame crawls, and register display, are able to work with no symbolic info at all. In some cases, such as disassembly, GDB will use symbolic info to present addresses relative to symbols rather than as raw numbers, but it will work either way.