What Is Hardware Acceleration and How Is It Useful?

We go over both benefits and downsides

Hardware acceleration uses specially-built computer hardware (i.e., silicon microchips) to do a narrow set of tasks faster than a general-purposeCPU(central processing unit).

What does that mean to you as the user? You’ll often have the option of turning hardware acceleration on or off in your applications. So how useful is hardware acceleration, and what does it do?

What Is Hardware Acceleration (Simple Edition)

Here’s a simple explanation of hardware acceleration. Skip to the next section for an in-depth look at the process.

The CPU in your computer can solve just about any type of mathematical problem. CPU circuits use more components to deal with many kinds of tasks. They take up more space, generate more heat, and aren’t as elegantly designed as a circuit built for a single job.

With hardware acceleration, a special integrated circuit or microprocessor does one specific task or a narrow set of related jobs. The circuit’s design is not wasted on anything else, and this provides a significant performance advantage.

Sometimes that hardware is built into the CPU itself. Most modern CPUs have dedicated internal sections that accelerate specific types of math used for tasks such asvideo encodingandencryption.

In short, hardware acceleration means giving a specific job to a unique piece of hardware that’s a jack of one trade and rocks at it.

What Are the Benefits of Hardware Acceleration?

How does hardware acceleration benefit the application you’re using? It often depends on the type of hardware and the type of acceleration, but the usual benefits apply to most situations.

Are There Downsides to Hardware Acceleration?

In general, hardware acceleration is something that you’ll want to leave on, but there are some cases where it can be a drawback.

Where Can I Use Hardware Acceleration?

There are too many forms of hardware acceleration available to list them all here, but here are a few common ones that you will encounter as an average computer user.

Web browsers can be surprisingly CPU-heavy applications. Modern websites have fancy graphical effects and high-fidelity sights and sounds. Web applications that use 3D graphics benefit from GPU hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration is usually on by default in these applications, and you should only disable it fortroubleshooting.

Graphical Processors started life as 3D graphics accelerators, but modern GPUs can do a fairly wide range of simple operations very quickly. These processors consist of hundreds or thousands of simple small processors that all work in parallel.

This makes them ideal for certain types of data crunching that need to be run through an algorithm. GPUs are designed this way because rendering graphics involves processing pixel values in parallel. So your GPU determines what each of the millions of pixels on the screen should look like at the same time. It turns out that deep learning and data mining applications also benefit from this approach to computation.

GPU developers have now added dedicated co-processors that do an even more specialized job than the GPU cores.

Acceleration Is Everywhere

There’s hardware acceleration in almost every computing device these days and as certain computing jobs become popular, computer scientists will create even more dedicated systems to make them work faster and more efficiently.

So sit back and enjoy the speed!

Sydney Butler is a social scientist and technology fanatic who tries to understand how people and technology coexist. He has two decades of experience as a freelance computer technician and more than a decade as a technologies researcher and instructor. Sydney has been a professional technology writer for more than five years and covers topics such as VR, Gaming, Cyber security and Transhumanism.Read Sydney’s Full Bio

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What Is Hardware Acceleration and How Is It Useful?#

What Is Hardware Acceleration (Simple Edition)#

What Are the Benefits of Hardware Acceleration?#

Are There Downsides to Hardware Acceleration?#

Where Can I Use Hardware Acceleration?#

Acceleration Is Everywhere#