Hardware acceleration can slow your computer when switched off. This is because the CPU has to process all of the data. By turning it on, you can shift some of the processing power to specialized hardware like audio and graphics cards, freeing up your processor for more tasks.
This is because these devices were designed for a specific task and are more adept at it than your computer’s general-purpose processor. Hardware accelerators are used to accomplish various tasks, like 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular expression hardware acceleration that can stop spam attacks using patterns such as ‘
As a design tool, hardware acceleration is used to accelerate the execution of algorithms that would otherwise take a long time for a standard processor to accomplish. They can be integrated into a chip or external components that connect directly to the processor, mapping instructions from a processor to hardware-accelerated functions. They can range in granularity from a simple functional unit, like a block of memory to handle bit blits to a complete hardware accelerator that runs fixed algorithms, such as motion estimation.
Cadence provides a broad set of tools that support hardware acceleration design processes. These include Stratus high level synthesizing, Genus logic, Innovus implementation systems, Conformal low power analysis and Joules Power Analysis. These tools let designers create cost-effective and highly efficient hardware accelerations that are designed for the intended applications and markets.