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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."

4 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hm by mikael · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They aren't cutting out entire blocks of ASIC circuitry in a Boolean keep or remove decision. They are sacrificing precision by reducing transistor count, and doing so in a somewhat heuristic approach in order to limit the loss of precision. Their algorithm will explore the worst case and best case of each arithmetic operation in order to achieve this. Not too different from the MiniMax approach to playing Chess or other board games.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  2. That's fine ... by PPH · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... for a specific application, like a hearing aid. Not so good for microprocessors intended for general purpose use (broad markets).

    If you have sufficient market volume, you can afford to produce some sort of 'application specific integrate circuit'. Hmm, an ASIC. Now there's a novel idea (putting on jacket to make a dash to the patent office).

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  3. Madman Muntz famous(and rich)for this last century by shoppa · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Removing unnecessary parts from a circuit until it stops working, is now something "new"?

    From Wikipedia entry on Madman Muntz:

    Muntz played the madman in his unorthodox television commercials, but in fact he was a shrewd businessman and a self-taught electrical engineer. By trial and error, taking apart and studying Philco, RCA, and DuMont televisions, he figured out how to reduce the devices' electrical components to their minimum functional number. This practice became known as "Muntzing".
    He often carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he thought that one of his employees was "over-engineering" a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer "Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in" and walk away.

  4. Re:Hm by ZankerH · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Already been done, it's called one instruction set computing, and it makes brainfuck look like python in comparison.