What is Accelerator?

In general, an accelerator is a component that speeds up a specific task or process within a system. This can refer to hardware accelerators (like GPUs or dedicated ASICs for AI/ML workloads, video encoding, or network processing) or software techniques (like caching or optimized algorithms). The primary use is to improve performance, reduce latency, and increase throughput for computationally intensive tasks. Hardware accelerators offload processing from the main CPU, while software accelerators optimize the way the CPU performs those tasks.