Hardware Acceleration
Hardware acceleration refers to the use of specialized hardware components designed to perform specific computational tasks more efficiently than software running on general-purpose processors. By implementing algorithms directly in silicon, hardware accelerators can achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance, energy efficiency, and throughput compared to equivalent software implementations on CPUs.
The concept of hardware acceleration has become increasingly important as the demands of modern computing workloads have outpaced the improvements available from traditional CPU scaling. From graphics processing units that revolutionized visual computing to neural network accelerators powering artificial intelligence applications, specialized hardware has become essential for meeting the performance requirements of contemporary systems while maintaining acceptable power consumption levels.
Hardware accelerators operate on the principle of trading generality for efficiency. While a CPU must be able to execute arbitrary instruction sequences, an accelerator can be optimized for a narrow class of operations, allowing designers to employ parallelism, custom data paths, and specialized memory architectures that would be impractical in a general-purpose design. This specialization enables accelerators to deliver superior performance per watt for their target workloads.