Hardware Acceleration As a Design Tool

When hardware acceleration is turned off video games, high-definition videos, and many other programs slow down your PC as the CPU tries to process everything. By turning it on, you’ll transfer some of the processing power to special equipment such as graphics cards and audio cards. This allows your processor to be utilized for other tasks.

These devices are more in a specific task than the processor of your computer. Hardware accelerators are used for various tasks, including 3D rendering, decoding videos, and even regular expression hardware acceleration to stop spam attacks using patterns like ‘ r n’.

Hardware acceleration is used as an engineering tool to boost the efficiency of algorithms that are algorithm-intensive and would require a general-purpose CPU to take too long to run. They can be integrated into a chip or components that connect directly to processors, converting instructions for processors to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity, from a single http://silminds.com/use-cases/ unit, like a memory block that handles bit blits to an entire accelerator that runs a fixed algorithms, such as a motion estimation.

Cadence offers a broad set of tools that are designed to assist in every stage of the hardware acceleration design process from Stratus high-level synthesizing and Genus logic to Innovus implementation system, conformal low-power analysis and Joules RTL power analysis. These tools help designers create highly efficient, cost-effective hardware accelerators that are designed for the intended application and market.