You can "hardware accelerate" Bitcoin by using a x86_64 binaries instead of 32bit.  The hashing functions and signature validation is *much* faster on 64bit.

Linux distributes 64bit and 32bit binaries.  Currently Windows and Mac builds are 32bit only and could be faster if there were 64bit builds.  The developers don't want to do additional 64bit builds because that would be more time in QA testing, so there would be a cost in paying developers to make and test it.