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'Pruned' Microchips Twice As Fast and Efficient
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."
It's news that removing unnecessary parts of a circuit make it more efficient? Really?
I'll be removing the training wheels off my Harley this afternoon... thanks to this article I can be badass and efficient
Well DUH....
I was trying to make it more efficient by getting rid of some of the unused cores, so I got a pair of scissors and pruned off a couple of those cores. I put the pruned, aero dynamic chip back in my machine and now it won't start up! On the plus side, the power savings are noticeable :)
Indeed. Pruning - makes your processor get up and go!
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
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.
Uh, no, Professor, I don't believe it is.
... 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.
From Wikipedia entry on Madman Muntz:
"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.
Great. It's more efficient. Now they can charge even more, and your insurance won't cover it because it's experimental, but even if they do, you'll only get one hearing aid ever decade because your insurance deems that acceptable.
I'm hearing impaired from birth (23 yrs). Just got my newest pair last week (previous pair is 5 years old, but working perfectly).
In several ways, this new pair is an upgrade.... but in one key way, I fucking hate these things. Both the previous and current hearing aids are digital (my previous pairs were analog). With the older pair there is a two second delay between turning the hearing aid on and hearing stuff. The new pair has a minimum of 6 seconds...
So if I need to scratch the inside of my ear quickly, I can do that in a second. Then I wait another 6 before I can hear again. Similarly, if I'm working without hearing aids in (relaxing, comfortable etc) and someone says something to me, I now have to wait almost 10 seconds before I can have them repeat what was said, then reply.
See the problem?
Hearing aid engineers are doing a lot of this work wrong (or for the wrong market, aka old people). Battery life is fine (a bit more than 2 weeks). I don't use the shitty auto-background-blocking programs on the hearing aid, either.
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.
Now all we need is fertilizer for our processors. Then we prune them and make them grow!
Then I'll graft bits and pieces of other processor and chips and make my own type of chip!
But then, the bugs get at it and I'll have to spray poison on it....hmmmm.....maybe I could make organic chips?! Think about it: computer chips made out of carbon! The hippie computer scientists will pay a premium for those!
I'll be rich!
He was probably responsible for those TVs I had when I was young which would lose sync when conditions weren't perfect, as in: either the Sun or the Moon were up.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
If I had to use a commuter bike that I could modify on a race, I'd be thinking about changing the gear ratio before dropping a marginal amount of weight.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
also they are twice as good at doing half the nothing. They run empty infinite loops at half the power too.
You can't handle the truth.
"Pruning" has been around a while. Intel's been doing it since the 486 sx. That was just a laser zapped cpu that didn't use all of its components to get the job done at a less capable pace. You had to pay a premium to get the full DX. Now we're cutting things out to get the better performance. So now we will have to pay more for performance and for a lesser supply of materials. See, Capitalism wins once again. That's probably the real innovation here.
Patient I'm losing my hearing
Doctor (After checking him for anything serious) Don't worry it's part of the aging process.
Patient Can you do anything for me?
Doctor We can get you a hearing aid.
Patient How much will that cost?
Doctor Well, we have two models. One costs $1000 and the other costs $5.
Patient What's the difference between the two.
Doctor One is a sophisticated minitiarized amplifier assembled, customized to fit your ear, and tuned by highly trained technicians. The other is a button with a wire that goes to a wooden box in your pocket.
Patient What does the button do?
Doctor Nothing. But you'd be surprised at how much louder people talk when they see you wearing it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I say we call this a Reduced Instruction Set Computer! This could be BIG!
Is that so wrong?
Yes, you are right. This is the spirit of RISC.
But RISC was wrong. RISC resulted from a study of what instruction were actually used by typical applications that were compiled with standard compilers. This is like studying what railroad tracks are used and concluding that rail travel would be optimum if certain tracks were eliminated and others improved. This conclusion is wrong, because it assumes that existing rails include all optimal paths. In actuality, there might be paths that do not currently have rails.
Thus, the conclusion that a CPU should have fewer instructions is specious. A more accurate conclusion would have been that a CPU should have an optimum set of instructions for its intended task.
For example, consider the fact that linked lists are heavily used by most C programs. Yet, the C language does not have a linked list primitive: one has to use a library. Therefore, if a CPU had linked list operations built in (as the VAX did), a C compiler could not even use those operations because the language does not support it. Instead of concluding that the CPU's instruction should be fewer, one might conclude that the CPU should have linked list operations built in, and that linked list operations should be added to C. The result might be much faster programs.
My point is that RISC exposed the issue of the matching of CPU instruction to software, but the conclusion that CPUs should be simpler was wrong. The right conclusion would have been that CPUs should have optimal instructions, which might mean removing some and adding others - not merely removing some.
There is obviously more to the technology, but the "unnecessary" information has been pruned in order to make the article tighter and more accessible to the masses. Unfortunately, they removed all the bits that separate the approach from the engineering norm so it no longer functions as News for Nerds.
The key part they are removing is error detection and correction. They are creating chips which have an ~8% chance of producing an incorrect result. Supposedly hearing aids will accept a 10% error rate, so it is a good trade off.
These aren't "redundant" parts, they're parts which prevent errors from happening. It's just that in some applications they don't care about errors.
It's like looking at the various floating point bugs and going, "meh, close enough". Sucks for a spreadsheet, but if all you care about is integers 0-10, you probably aren't going to notice.
Here's the actual press release:
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=15497&SnID=154992879
"Inexact Hardware" seems to be the new term. Since they mention hearing aids, it seems to be that it's bringing the fuzziness of analog back into the digital world.
this is the result of engineers who don't know how to design.
if you are _designing_ something, why in the world are you going to put in something you don't need ?
I spend my days trying to come up with clever ideas to NOT use things. Simple as possible and no simpler.
Absolute statements are never true
I always thought power was measured in Newton meters per second, Joules per second, or more commonly as Watts.
What you didn't mention is that "Muntz admitted his business lost $1,457,000 from April to August 1953,[28] and although he tried to reorganize, Muntz TV filed bankruptcy and went out of business in 1959" (from the same Wikipedia article)
You see, engineers don't sprinkle components at random. Every component in an electronic circuit is there for a reason. If something can be removed, what you have is a defective specification, maybe your circuit is designed to perform a function that's not often used, maybe it's designed to function in a situation that never happens. In that case you can ask the engineer to redesign for looser specifications.
Removing components at random is just stupid.
Perhaps the news is that enough time has passed since RISC that the notion is new again. Except with one sad and sorry exception. The RISC guys are way better engineers because they calculate various effects of their instruction sets and other optimizations BEFORE committing to silicon. The guys in TFA are relative chimps because they're just pruning, testing, and bandaging something they don't seem to fully understand.
An analogy comes to mind: some kids buy a car and pull off pieces until it doesn't work right. Once it breaks, they add duct tape until the car runs again. The stripped down car gets better mileage and can go faster. Somewhere along the way, some journalist looks at the thing and gets excited by the brand new car the kids built. The journalist trumpets to the sky about the wonderful new car and automotive geniuses he's discovered. The kids start a car company, dumb people invest. Meanwhile, automotive engineers furrow their brows, shake their heads, and go back to work.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
Sounds a bit like how Woz built the first Apple computers, finding ways to do more with less.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
And I would hope the measurements would be in microamperes. Or that the D cell that powers it is a standard one, not an expensive lithium D cell...
The FPU was an expensive low-yield section of the circuit on the 486 processor. Often, the 486sx parts were ones with defects in the FPU section, so they just disabled the FPU and sold them cheap.
I don't think Timothy is a nerd. I don't even think he knows what one is.
I'm sorry if this offends you tim, but from what i've seen, you are really fucking lame. You post up the stupidest fucking articles possible.
What, does your 8 year old cousin do this for you?
I understand the concept of "practice makes perfect" but you should realize that there is some things we aren't good at, and this job you do, here at slashdot, isn't for you. You suck at it. You haven't gotten better, you've gotten worse. Why don't you find something else that's more your speed. I don't know what that is, and I don't care. As long as it is far away from slashdot.
Be seeing you...
SPEED HOLES!!!!!
Digital chips are roughly comprised of memory (flip flops) with logic in between. On each clock cycle the logic takes data from one piece of (input) memory, transforms it in some way and stores it in some other (output) memory.
One of the primary limitations on the speed of the chip is the longest path. The length of a path is roughly a function of the physical length of the path that the data takes from input to output memory and the number/type of logic gates in between. The speed of the chip is roughly limited to 1/[Time taken for data to cross the longest path] Hz
If you remove a significant amount of logic there is a chance that you might be removing the longest and most complex paths for data to cross and also that all the components can be spaced closer together, meaning that there is less distance for the data to cover. For this reason, removing parts of the chip might be able to speed it up.
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