When hardware acceleration is disabled, videos, high-definition games and a host of other programs will slow down your computer as the CPU tries to process everything. By turning it on, you can shift some of this processing power to specific hardware such as audio and graphics cards, freeing your processor for more tasks.

These devices are more for a specific task than your computer’s processor. Hardware accelerators are utilized for various tasks, like 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular-expression hardware acceleration to stop spam attacks that employ patterns such as ‘ r n’.

As a design tool hardware acceleration can be used to accelerate the execution of algorithm-intensive algorithms that would otherwise take a long time for a general-purpose processor to complete. They can be integrated into a chip, or external components that directly communicate with processors, converting instructions from the processor to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity from a single component such as a memory block that handles bit blits up to an entire accelerator that runs a fixed algorithms, such as a motion estimation.

Cadence offers a full set of tools that support hardware acceleration design processes. These include Stratus high level synthesizing, Genus logic synthesis, Innovus implementation systems, Low-power analysis of conformal design and Joules Power Analysis. These tools allow designers to develop highly efficient, cost-effective hardware https://silminds.com accelerators that are optimized for the intended application and market.