What is the difference between software and hardware compression? Does hardware compression provide a better compression ratio than software compression?
A. Hardware compression and software compression refer to the site in the router to which the compression algorithm is applied. In software compression, it is implemented in the main CPU as a software process. In hardware compression, the compression computations are offloaded to a secondary hardware module. This frees the central CPU from the computationally intensive task of compression calculations. If you assume that the router has the available clock cycles in order to perform the compression calculations—for example, CPU utilization remains at less than 100 percent—then there is no difference in the efficiency of hardware compression or software compression. The achieved compression ratio is a function of the compression algorithm selected and the amount of redundancy in the data to be compressed. It is not where the compression calculations take place.
