H/W S/W Design Partition Principles

Decide what to do in hardware:

• Physical I/O (line drivers/transducers/media interfaces),
• Highly compute-intensive, fixed functions,

what to do on custom processors:

• Bit-oriented operations,
• Highly compute-intensive SIMD,
• Other algorithms with custom data paths,
• Algorithms that might be altered post tape out.

and what to do in S/W on standard cores:

• Highly-complex, non-repetitive functions,
• Low-throughput computations of any sort,
• Functions that might be altered post tape out.
• As much as possible.