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difference btw H/W & S/W implementations

O

OP

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi,

Feeling really intelligent today.. I would like to know some basic
stuff..

What is the difference between a hardware implementation of an
algorithm and a
software one.

How do you say an algorithm is faster in one and slower in other.. if
it's based on timing how do you do that?? What makes it faster in one
and not in other??

all the help is appreciated.

OP.
 
D

David C. Ullrich

Jan 1, 1970
0
On 25 Feb 2004 03:02:27 -0800, [email protected] (OP) wrote:

This has nothing to do with the topic of sci.logic. Probably
you should repost, maybe in
comp.really.deep.questions.about.computing.
Hi,

Feeling really intelligent today.. I would like to know some basic
stuff..

What is the difference between a hardware implementation of an
algorithm and a
software one.

How do you say an algorithm is faster in one and slower in other.. if
it's based on timing how do you do that?? What makes it faster in one
and not in other??

all the help is appreciated.

OP.


************************

David C. Ullrich
 
D

Douglas A. Gwyn

Jan 1, 1970
0
OP said:
What is the difference between a hardware implementation of an
algorithm and a software one.

What is the difference between hardware and software?
(These days, many hardware implementations involve a
lot of programmed hardware elements, so the distinction
is blurry.)
How do you say an algorithm is faster in one and slower in other.. if
it's based on timing how do you do that?? What makes it faster in one
and not in other??

For a given hardware technology, it is less efficient
to use the hardware to emulate some general-purpose
computer architecture which is then used to interpret
logic instructions from some software than to directly
construct the same (specialized) logic with the basic
hardware.

Timing is done using clocks.
 
B

Bill Sloman

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi,

Feeling really intelligent today.. I would like to know some basic
stuff..

What is the difference between a hardware implementation of an
algorithm and a software one.

How do you say an algorithm is faster in one and slower in other.. if
it's based on timing how do you do that?? What makes it faster in one
and not in other??

all the help is appreciated.

A software implementation of an algorithm runs on general purpose
hardware, and a hardware implementation runs on hardware that has been
tweaked to run the algorithm as fast as possible, sometimes by
providing parallel processors so that some operations that might have
to be run in sequence on a general-purpose processor can be run in
parallel.

The algorithm is fundamental, and the real difference is in the
hardware that executes it.

Bear in mind that there is some quite freaky "general purpose"
hardware around. IIRR the Transputer range of digital signal
processing chips used to include a device with a bunch of multiplier
accumulators on board to implement fast digital FIR filter structures,
and there are definitely specialised chips available for executing the
fast Fourier transform in minimum time.
 
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