When hardware acceleration is disabled video games, high-definition videos, and many other programs will slow down your system as the CPU attempts to process everything. By turning it on, you can transfer some of the processing power to specially designed equipment like audio cards and graphics cards. This lets your processor be used for other functions.

This is because these devices are made for a specific task and are better in this area than your computer’s general purpose processor. Hardware accelerators can be used for a wide variety of tasks, including 3D rendering, video decoding and even regular expression acceleration in the server industry. This is to stop spam attacks that use patterns such as ‘ R n’.

Hardware acceleration is utilized as an instrument for design to improve the performance of algorithms that require a lot of algorithm and would take a general-purpose CPU too long to execute. They can be integrated into a chip, or be external components that communicate with processors by mapping processor instructions to hardware-accelerated functions. They can range in granularity from a simple functional unit, like memory blocks to handle bit blits to a complete hardware accelerator that executes fixed algorithms, such as motion estimation.

Cadence provides a full suite of tools http://silminds.com/silax-arch/ to help with every step of the hardware acceleration design process, from Stratus high-level synthesizing and Genus logic to Innovus implementation system, Conformal low-power analyses and Joules RTL power analysis. These tools help designers develop highly efficient, cost-effective hardware accelerators that are designed for their intended uses and market.