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

Hmmmm

[naz404]

I wonder what Harold would have to say about Prof. Kumar's theory.

Sounds like...

[Chineseyes]

Sounds like Kumar and his friend Harold have been spending too much time baking weed brownies and not silicon wafers.

I don't know why

[BronsCon]

but now I want some White Castle.

Re:Impossible design

[jd]

1 hardware error every year is probably acceptable for casual computing use, but not for nuclear reactor control

Someone should have told British Nuclear Fuel. I think Windscale/Selafield was up to 20 accidental nuclear waste discharges a year at one point.