For hardware accelerators in startup companies, see Seed accelerator.
Specialized computer hardware
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Hardware acceleration" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(September 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
A cryptographic accelerator card allows cryptographic operations to be performed at a faster rate.
Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calculated in software running on a generic CPU can also be calculated in custom-made hardware, or in some mix of both.
To perform computing tasks more efficiently, generally one can invest time and money in improving the software, improving the hardware, or both. There are various approaches with advantages and disadvantages in terms of decreased latency, increased throughput and reduced energy consumption. Typical advantages of focusing on software may include greater versatility, more rapid development, lower non-recurring engineering costs, heightened portability, and ease of updating features or patching bugs, at the cost of overhead to compute general operations. Advantages of focusing on hardware may include speedup, reduced power consumption,[1] lower latency, increased parallelism[2] and bandwidth, and better utilization of area and functional components available on an integrated circuit; at the cost of lower ability to update designs once etched onto silicon and higher costs of functional verification, times to market, and need for more parts. In the hierarchy of digital computing systems ranging from general-purpose processors to fully customized hardware, there is a tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency, with efficiency increasing by orders of magnitude when any given application is implemented higher up that hierarchy.[3] This hierarchy includes general-purpose processors such as CPUs,[4] more specialized processors such as programmable shaders in a GPU,[5] fixed-function implemented on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),[6] and fixed-function implemented on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).[7]
Hardware acceleration is advantageous for performance, and practical when the functions are fixed so updates are not as needed as in software solutions. With the advent of reprogrammable logic devices such as FPGAs, the restriction of hardware acceleration to fully fixed algorithms has eased since 2010, allowing hardware acceleration to be applied to problem domains requiring modification to algorithms and processing control flow.[8][9] The disadvantage however, is that in many open source projects, it requires proprietary libraries that not all vendors are keen to distribute or expose, making it difficult to integrate in such projects.
^"Microsoft Supercharges Bing Search With Programmable Chips". WIRED. 16 June 2014.
^"Embedded". Archived from the original on 2007-10-08. Retrieved 2012-08-18. "FPGA Architectures from 'A' to 'Z'" by Clive Maxfield 2006
^Sinan, Kufeoglu; Mahmut, Ozkuran (2019). "Figure 5. CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC minimum energy consumption between difficulty recalculation.". Energy Consumption of Bitcoin Mining. doi:10.17863/CAM.41230.
^Kim, Yeongmin; Kong, Joonho; Munir, Arslan (2020). "CPU-Accelerator Co-Scheduling for CNN Acceleration at the Edge". IEEE Access. 8: 211422–211433. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3039278. ISSN 2169-3536.
^Lin, Yibo; Jiang, Zixuan; Gu, Jiaqi; Li, Wuxi; Dhar, Shounak; Ren, Haoxing; Khailany, Brucek; Pan, David Z. (April 2021). "DREAMPlace: Deep Learning Toolkit-Enabled GPU Acceleration for Modern VLSI Placement". IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. 40 (4): 748–761. doi:10.1109/TCAD.2020.3003843. ISSN 1937-4151. S2CID 225744481.
^Lyakhov, Pavel; Valueva, Maria; Valuev, Georgii; Nagornov, Nikolai (2020-12-18). "A Method of Increasing Digital Filter Performance Based on Truncated Multiply-Accumulate Units". Applied Sciences. 10 (24): 9052. doi:10.3390/app10249052. ISSN 2076-3417. Hardware simulation on FPGA increased the digital filter performance.
^Mohan, Prashanth; Wang, Wen; Jungk, Bernhard; Niederhagen, Ruben; Szefer, Jakub; Mai, Ken (October 2020). "ASIC Accelerator in 28 nm for the Post-Quantum Digital Signature Scheme XMSS". 2020 IEEE 38th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD). Hartford, CT, USA: IEEE. pp. 656–662. doi:10.1109/ICCD50377.2020.00112. ISBN 978-1-7281-9710-4. S2CID 229330964.
^Morgan, Timothy Pricket (2014-09-03). "How Microsoft Is Using FPGAs To Speed Up Bing Search". Enterprise Tech. Retrieved 2018-09-18.
^"Project Catapult". Microsoft Research.
and 27 Related for: Hardware acceleration information
Hardwareacceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose...
library for Windows 3.x, and their later DirectDraw interface for hardwareacceleration of 2D games in Windows 95 and later. In the early- and mid-1990s...
allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit...
Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated...
Virginia Hardware acceleration, the speedup of computing tasks by performing them in customized hardware rather than software Hardware architecture, the...
Quentyn (October 19, 2011). "Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has HardwareAcceleration". Phandroid. Archived from the original on October 21, 2011. Retrieved...
Crypto API (Linux).) The following chips, while supporting AES hardwareacceleration, do not support AES-NI: AMD Geode LX processors VIA, using VIA PadLock...
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer...
have announced support for hardwareacceleration of the WebM format. Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based...
TLS acceleration in a reverse proxy configuration. Modern x86 CPUs support Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encoding and decoding in hardware, using...
264. Flash Player uses hardwareacceleration to display video where present, using technologies such as DirectX Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so....
engineers have employed simulation acceleration, emulation or prototyping on reprogrammable hardware to verify and debug hardware and software for SoC designs...
DirectShow uses DirectSound's hardware audio acceleration capabilities if the sound card's hardware audio acceleration capabilities exist and are exposed...
dedicated hardware for video encoding and decoding (Intel's Quick Sync Video, Nvidia's NVENC, or AMD's Video Coding Engine / Video Core Next). This hardware is...
Networking hardware, also known as network equipment or computer networking devices, are electronic devices that are required for communication and interaction...
in Microsoft Windows since Windows Vista that enables the use of hardwareacceleration to render the graphical user interface of Windows. It was originally...
path, or sometimes as coprocessors. These units allowed direct hardwareacceleration of very specific but complex mathematical problems, like the Fourier-transform...
platform is an environment in which software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), a web browser and associated application...
software under Apache License 2. Starting in 2011, OpenCV features GPU acceleration for real-time operations. Officially launched in 1999 the OpenCV project...
Nest Accelerator Unit (NXU) hardwareacceleration from the zEDC Express I/O expansion cards used in z14 systems for hardware Deflate compression and decompression...
such as games. Direct3D uses hardwareacceleration if it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardwareacceleration of the entire 3D rendering...
The reason is that details of the parallel hardware leak into the abstractions used to program the hardware. This causes the programmer to have to map...
commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardwareacceleration for the Mesa implementation...
3D hardwareacceleration, making them well-suited for non-trivial, computation-intensive visualizations. As browsers have gained support for hardware-accelerated...
Global Information
