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'Pruned' Microchips Twice As Fast and Efficient

Posted by timothy on from the use-the-tiny-tin-snips dept.

Zothecula writes "If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston's Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. The removal of portions of circuits that aren't essential to the task at hand is known as 'probabilistic pruning,' and it results in chips that are twice as fast, use half the power, and are half the size of conventional chips."

5 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Hm by mewshi_nya · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's news that removing unnecessary parts of a circuit make it more efficient? Really?

    1. Re:Hm by Shikaku · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the news is they developed a heuristic of least used parts of a chip, slapped on a tiny emulator so functions don't fail, and call it a day.

      For example, Chip $foo has functions A B C D E & F. E is used on average once every gigaflop, so using the CPU/other functions, they implement E and cut out all parts for E.

  2. Slashdot cynics are right again by russotto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Someone's going to chime in and say that the naysayers are oversimplifying or denigrating this because they didn't think of it, but I think the quote below says enough.

    "I believe this is the first time someone has taken an integrated circuit and said, 'Let's get rid of the part that we don't need,'" said principal investigator Krishna Palem, a Professor of Computing at Rice.

    Uh, no, Professor, I don't believe it is.

  3. erm by DaveGod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "I believe this is the first time someone has taken an integrated circuit and said, 'Let's get rid of the part that we don't need,'"

    I believe this to be a basic part of design.

  4. Re:Madman Muntz famous(and rich)for this last cent by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, I'm not that crazy about that idea.

    From what I gather the components being removed are most likely resistors and capacitors. And sure, some can be probably removed, if you don't mind ending up with a noisy power supply and too much current going to various parts.

    So you're left with a device that kind of works, but that may mysteriously stop working in a few months.