Evernessince
Posts: 5,469 +6,158
Software and hardware are ultimately the same thing, the difference being that one is etched into a circuit board and the other only lives on a storage medium. As anybody who's studied computer architecture should tell you, software eventually makes it's way onto hardware in the form of circuitry or an instruction. Can you image if processors didn't have multi-media extensions built into them today? You move software down the virtualization stack in order to allow increased complexity at the higher levels. Eventually things that were very hard for computers to do are simplified and put into circuits built into the computer. I believe that ARM follows this method even more closely than x86, in that it has dedicated cores for specific functions.
