Originally posted by D1N0 Ricoh should really provide this as a firmware update. It's just algorithms. Nothing hardware specific.
Algorithms run on hardware. If the hardware is not powerful enough, it might not be able to complete the algorithm in time, especially since focusing has to be calculated in real-time. Notice that the K-1ii has shorter battery life, which hints that the hardware is more powerful.
Also, at least in the field of general computing, “accelerator” means that some specific algorithms are implemented in hardware itself. For example, in most music players, MP3 decoding is done in a dedicated decoder chip. If focusing algorithms are implemented in a specialized circuitry, upgrading algorithm means upgrading hardware.
On a personal note, if they released the source code to their firmware, maybe someone from community could improve the focusing, but I doubt they could improve it by much.
Disclaimer: I have NO programming experience with computing accelerators, but I have read some literature on it and can testify form personal experience, that encoding H.264 video on CPU without accelerators is painfully slow. I have no idea how Pentax focusing is actually implemented.