Hardware Acceleration As a Design Tool

When hardware acceleration is off, videos, high-definition games and other programs can slow down your system as the CPU attempts to process everything. By turning it off, you can transfer some of the processing power to specific hardware such as sound cards and http://silminds.com/silax-arch/ graphics cards, freeing up your processor to handle more tasks.

This is because these devices are designed to accomplish a specific job and are more efficient at it than your computer’s general-purpose processor. Hardware accelerators can be used for various tasks, including 3D rendering, decoding video, and even regular expression hardware acceleration to stop spam attacks using patterns like ‘ R n’.

Hardware acceleration is an engineering tool to boost the performance of algorithms that are algorithmic and would normally take a general-purpose processor too long to execute. They can be built into a chip, or be external components that interact with processors by mapping instructions for processors to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity from a single unit, like a memory block that handles bit blits to an entire accelerator that runs a fixed algorithms, such as motion estimation.

Cadence offers a wide range of tools to help support hardware acceleration design processes. These include Stratus high-level synthesizing, Genus logic synthesis, Innovus implementation systems, Low power analysis for conformal systems and Joules Power Analysis. These tools enable designers to create cost-effective and highly efficient hardware accelerations that are designed for the intended applications and markets.