Best Practice Guide - Modern Accelerators

Hardware accelerators offer certain advantages over general-purpose Central Processing Units (CPUs) as they provide a greater computational throughput when applications exhibit high degrees of data parallelism, due to their highly parallel architectural design and high-bandwidth memory systems. These specialized chips are usually more energy-efficient, i.e. are capable of delivering much higher compute performance as compared to CPUs at the same power cost. These characteristics make accelerator technologies appealing both for system vendors and users.