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Why are some functions hardwired (mostly those used in games like swapping framebuffers)? What does the term hardware-accelerated mean?

mrk
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I've never heard of hardwired in General-Purpose computing.

Hardware-accelerated means the application is developed to take advantage of accelerators on the system which the application is running on. Most conventional hardware-accelerators are GPUs found in most of desktop systems. In supercomputing, the term accelerator is referred to IBM PowerPC BQC, Intel Xeon Phi, GPUs, or FPGAs co-processors accelerating specific computations.

lashgar
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  • Don't forget about CPU-based acceleration pipelines, such as SSE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions – 3Dave Sep 26 '12 at 16:30
  • @ahmad Hardwired means implemented directly in the hardware (that's what I've leaned in the computer architecture class). Right? – mrk Sep 26 '12 at 17:30
  • @saadtaame The only hardwired I know is the control-unit design in CPUs. This design is an alternative to microprogram. You can further detail about it [here][ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_unit ]. – lashgar Sep 26 '12 at 18:10