hardwarecapabilities
Hardware capabilities refer to the range of features and capacities that a computer system’s physical components can support. They describe what the hardware is able to do, such as processing power, memory and storage capacity, graphics performance, I/O interfaces, security features, virtualization support, and firmware-enforced behaviors. Capabilities differ from current resources; capabilities are potential functions, while resources are the quantities currently available or in use (for example free RAM or GPU memory).
Categories of hardware capabilities include: processor instruction sets and extensions (such as AVX or SSE), memory
Discovery and exposure: operating systems determine capabilities at runtime through hardware enumeration and firmware-provided tables (ACPI,
Importance: software can adapt by feature checks, negotiate function sets, or select alternative implementations based on