Introducing Probability into Chip Design

prostoalex writes "The August issue of Intel Developer Update has an interview with Shekhar Borkar, Intel Fellow and Director of Circuit Research at Intel Corp. talking about the future of microprocessor design and what goes on inside Intel Labs. Borkar tells why we need even faster processors and how probability will make its way into future chip designs - "It's like the shift from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. We will shift from the deterministic designs of today to probabilistic and statistical designs of the future.""

Comments

Is this new?

[Jugalator]

"We will shift from the deterministic designs of today to probabilistic and statistical designs of the future"

Doesn't branch predictions in current processors use probabilities already?

Re:Is that 1.999 repeating?

[blancolioni]

The supremum of all reals less than one is one. The set itself, as you said, doesn't have a maximum element.

In a not-at-all-patronising way, I'm surprised that this is even up for discussion on /. but that's probably my bad. Anyway, say X was the maximum real number less than one. Let Y = 1 - (1 - X) / 2. Now clearly Y is less than 1, but also Y - X = (1 - X) / 2 which is > 0 since 1 - X > 0, so Y > X, and therefore X is not the maximum.