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When hardware acceleration is off video games, high-definition videos and a host of other programs slow down on your PC as the CPU tries to process everything. By turning it off, you can transfer some of the processing power to hardware that is specialized, such as audio and graphics cards, freeing up your processor for more tasks.

This is because these devices were designed for a specific purpose and are better in this area than your computer’s general-purpose processor. Hardware accelerators can be used for a wide variety of tasks, including 3D rendering, video decoding and even regular expression acceleration in the server industry. This is to stop spam attacks from using patterns like ‘ r n’.

As a design tool hardware acceleration can be used to accelerate the execution of algorithm-intensive algorithms that would otherwise take a long time for a standard processor to perform. They can be integrated into a chip or other components that communicate directly with processors, converting instructions from the processor to hardware-accelerated functions. They can be granular in nature from a single unit, like a memory block that handles bit blits to an entire accelerator that runs a fixed algorithms, like a motion estimation.

Cadence offers a comprehensive set of tools to support the hardware acceleration design process. These include Stratus high level synthesizing, Genus logic, Innovus implementation systems, Conformal low power analysis and Joules Power Analysis. These tools allow designers to create highly efficient and cost-effective hardware accelerations that are designed for the intended applications and markets.