Which component is commonly associated with hardware acceleration?

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are specifically designed to handle intensive computational tasks, particularly those related to rendering graphics and processing parallel tasks efficiently. This specialization allows GPUs to accelerate the performance of applications that can benefit from parallel processing, such as 3D rendering, video encoding, and machine learning tasks.

Unlike regular CPUs, which are general-purpose processors capable of handling a wide range of tasks but are not optimized for heavy parallel processing, GPUs are built with hundreds or thousands of smaller cores that can process multiple operations simultaneously. This architecture makes them ideal for tasks that require significant calculations to be done at once, greatly enhancing performance and speed in relevant applications.

Web browsers and database servers do not inherently involve hardware acceleration as a primary function. While modern web browsers may utilize hardware acceleration for graphics rendering, it is the GPU that enables this acceleration. Similarly, database servers focus on data management and retrieval rather than computation acceleration. Regular CPUs, while powerful, do not provide the same level of hardware acceleration for graphically intensive tasks as GPUs do.