Differentiate between Hardware and Software

Another classification is software vs. hardware. Hardware is the collection of physical components, like chips, wires, PCBs, connectors, I/O devices, etc. which form a computer Software is the collection of programs on a computer. Hardware and Software are equivalent in that any operation performed by the hardware can be built into software and any operation performed by software can be also directly realized by hardware. Hence, we have the software/hardware trade-off. This equivalence is under the assumption that there is a basic set of operations implemented in hardware. Decisions on what to include in software and hardware are based on the required speed, cost, frequency of expected changes, reliability, etc.