Hardware Acceleration As a Design Tool
When hardware acceleration is turned off video games, high-definition movies as well as a variety of other programs will slow down your computer as your CPU tries to process everything. By turning it on, you can shift some of this processing power to specific hardware such as graphics cards and sound cards, freeing up your processor for more tasks.
These devices are better in a specific task than your computer’s processor. Hardware accelerators are utilized for various tasks, such as 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular-expression hardware acceleration that can stop spam attacks using patterns like ‘ r n’.
Hardware acceleration can be used as a design tool http://silminds.com/news/ to improve the performance of algorithms that are algorithm-intensive and would normally take a general-purpose CPU too long to execute. They can be built into a chip, or be external components which communicate with a processor by mapping processor instructions to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity from a single functional component, such as the memory block that is used to handle bit blits, to an entire hardware accelerator that implements fixed algorithms, like motion estimation.
Cadence provides a broad set of tools that support hardware acceleration design processes. These include Stratus high level synthesis, Genus logic synthesis, Innovus implementation systems, Low-power analysis of conformal design and Joules Power Analysis. These tools allow designers to create cost-effective and highly efficient hardware accelerations that are optimized for the intended applications and markets.