the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU
In computing, hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU. Examples of hardware acceleration include blitting acceleration functionality in graphics processing units (GPUs) and instructions for complex operations in CPUs.
Normally, processors are sequential, and instructions are executed one by one. Various techniques are used to improve performance; hardware acceleration is one of them. The main difference between hardware and software is concurrency, allowing hardware to be much faster than software. Hardware accelerators are designed for computationally intensive software code. Depending upon granularity, hardware acceleration can vary from a small functional unit to a large functional block (like motion estimation in MPEG-2).
The hardware that performs the acceleration, when in a separate unit from the CPU, is referred to as a hardware accelerator, or often more specifically as graphics accelerator or floating-point accelerator, etc. Those terms, however, are older and have been replaced with less descriptive terms like video card or graphics card.
Many hardware accelerators are built on top of field-programmable gate array chips.
Recently, regular expression hardware acceleration has been gaining popularity in the server industry, owing to very noticeable speed ups in spam control.
