http://silminds.com/silax-arch/

When hardware acceleration is off video games, high-definition videos as well as a variety of other programs slow down on your PC as the CPU tries to process everything. By turning it on, you’ll be able to offload some of the processing power to specially designed equipment like audio and graphics cards. This allows your processor to be used for other tasks.

This is because these devices are designed for a specific task and are better in this area than your computer’s general purpose processor. Hardware accelerators can be used for various tasks, such as 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular-expression hardware acceleration to block spam attacks using patterns such as ‘ R n’.

As a design tool hardware acceleration is utilized to speed up the execution of algorithms that would otherwise take too long for a general purpose processor to complete. They can be built into an integrated circuit, or external components which communicate with a processor by mapping processor instructions to hardware-accelerated functions. They can vary in granularity and range from a small unit, like a memory block that handles bit blits up to an entire accelerator running a fixed algorithm, such a motion estimation.

Cadence provides a full suite of tools that are designed to assist in every step of the hardware acceleration design process from Stratus high-level Synthesis and Genus logic synthesis to Innovus implementation system, Conformal low-power analyses and Joules RTL power analysis. These tools enable designers to design cost-effective and efficient hardware accelerations that are optimized for the intended applications and markets.