>>37
A right balance can be achieved. At least on the PC, it's popular to offload video decoding to the GPU, but the CPU is still what drives most of the process. CPU usage needed for decoding is very low, but it's still there. This really depends on what kind of device it is and how power efficient it must be.
That assumes that the test suite is perfect. I know that hardware model testing (test benches) is a whole lot more serious that software testing will ever be, simply because the stakes are much higher in the sense that the cost of failure is much higher.