I’m very much not an expert, but I’d imagine it’s similar to how AES-NI works: the task is CPU/GPU-intensive until specific instructions are designed to do whatever blackmagicfuckery level math is required, and once it’s in hardware it’s more both power efficient and faster.
It’s things like this that make me mad copyright was extended so long. It was originally set at 20 years to prevent this from happening and encourage people to make new art.