Hardware Acceleration As a Design Tool
Hardware acceleration can cause slowdowns to your computer when shut off. This is because the CPU needs to process all data. By turning it on, you can shift some of this processing power to specialized hardware like sound cards and graphics cards, freeing your processor for other tasks.
This is because these devices were designed to perform a specific task and are better in this area than your computer’s general purpose processor. Hardware accelerators are utilized for various tasks, such as 3D rendering, decoding video, and even regular expression hardware acceleration to prevent spam attacks using patterns such as ‘
Hardware acceleration can be used as an engineering tool to speed up the performance of algorithms that are computationally intensive and would otherwise take a general-purpose CPU too long to execute. They can be integrated into a chip or external components that can communicate directly with the processor, mapping instructions for processors to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity from a simple functional unit, for example, a block of memory to handle bit blits to an entire hardware accelerator that runs fixed algorithms, for example motion estimation.
Cadence provides a complete set of tools to help with every step of the acceleration design process from Stratus high-level synthesizing and Genus logic synthesis to Innovus implementation system, Conformal low-power analysis and Joules RTL power analysis. These tools let designers create highly efficient, cost-effective hardware accelerators that are optimized for their intended use and market.