Hardware acceleration is the use of specialized hardware components to perform specific computing tasks more efficiently than a general-purpose CPU alone. Components such as GPUs, NPUs, and dedicated video-processing units can handle highly parallel or specialized workloads, improving performance while potentially reducing CPU usage and power consumption.
Hardware acceleration is commonly used for graphics rendering, video encoding and decoding, artificial intelligence, machine learning, scientific computing, encryption, and multimedia applications. By assigning suitable workloads to specialized processors, systems can achieve faster processing, smoother performance, and improved resource efficiency.
