When Mistakes Improve Performance

jd and other readers pointed out BBC coverage of research into "stochastic" CPUs that allow communication errors in order to reap benefits in performance and power usage. "Professor Rakesh Kumar at the University of Illinois has produced research showing that allowing communication errors between microprocessor components and then making the software more robust will actually result in chips that are faster and yet require less power. His argument is that at the current scale, errors in transmission occur anyway and that the efforts of chip manufacturers to hide these to create the illusion of perfect reliability simply introduces a lot of unnecessary expense, demands excessive power, and deoptimises the design. He favors a new architecture, that he calls the 'stochastic processor,' which is designed to handle data corruption and error recovery gracefully. He believes he has shown such a design would work and that it would permit Moore's Law to continue to operate into the foreseeable future. However, this is not the first time someone has tried to fundamentally revolutionize the CPU. The Transputer, the AMULET, the FM8501, the iWARP, and the Crusoe were all supposed to be game-changers but died cold, lonely deaths instead — and those were far closer to design philosophies programmers are currently familiar with. Modern software simply isn't written with the level of reliability the stochastic processor requires (and many software packages are too big and too complex to port), and the volume of available software frequently makes or breaks new designs. Will this be 'interesting but dead-end' research, or will Professor Kumar pull off a CPU architectural revolution really not seen since the microprocessor was designed?"

Comments

Re:Impossible design

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian-developed software will itself fuck up in a way that negates whatever fuck up just happened with the CPU. In the end, it all balances out, and the computation is correct.

Re:why use a stochastic processor?

[Arker]

Why use a stochastic processor which makes mistakes when we can use our brains, which make mistakes?

Because the stochastic processor will be able to make mistakes much more quickly of course.

Don't you understand progress?

Re:Wrong approach?

[jibjibjib]

Yeah because academics are idiots who measure performance in incorrect calculations per second, and they did this research without thinking of all these things that you've thought up in two minutes reading the Slashdot summary.

Seriously, people, get some common sense.

Re:Impossible design

[maxume]

Encomistakesding.

Or maybe truoble.

Re:So... It was harmful after all

[jd]

That's why some languages use ComeFrom rather than GoTo.