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'Inexact' Chips Save Power By Fudging the Math
Barence writes "Computer scientists have unveiled a computer chip that turns traditional thinking about mathematical accuracy on its head by fudging calculations. The concept works by allowing processing components — such as hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes, which means they are not working as hard, and so use less power and get through tasks more quickly. The Rice University researchers say prototypes are 15 times more efficient and could be used in some applications without having a negative effect."
37 posts about the Pentium division bug.
These chips will, of course, be aimed at government markets.
This is first post according to my new power-efficient computer!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Big difference between not dealing with full precision and encouraging erroneous behavior by trimming infrequently chunks of hardware.
"This isn't so much a circle as a square, what the hell's going on?!"
"Oh, that's because the chip in your machine doesn't accurately define PI, it rounds the value up"
"To what?"
"4"
Summation 2
Oh you misunderstand. It will still return the "right" answer, it'll just be "engineer" right, not "mathematician" right, i.e. "Good enough for all intents and purposes.
Furthermore, posting under the top post when your reply is nothing to do with the OP is considered a faux pas. Minus 50 DKP.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Humans tend to do fast imprecise math to decided when to cross the street. It looks like that car won't hit me, but i can't say its going to take 4.865 seconds for it to get to the crosswalk. Estimations, even if fudged and almost completely wrong, should play a massive role in AI.
This is exactly the problem with American chips lately. They're too lazy to put any effort into their work. Sure, they're "saving energy" but that just means they're going to become even more obese. Chips from many Asian manufacturers are already much more accurate and efficient than American ones. We need to encourage American chips to be more interested in STEM fields if we're ever going to turn our economy around!
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/08/1716235/sacrificing-accuracy-for-speed-and-efficiency-in-processors
Of course, you might've been sacrificing speed for accuracy in that 3 year estimate.
(and for all of the nay sayers -- I could see this being great for monte carlo simulations or other modeling where you're dealing with so much imprecise inputs that minor error's not going to be significant)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I envision the "less precise" CPUs being used in consumer laptops where people are just watching movies or listening to music.
It does not matter if the MPEG4 conversion is slightly off with the color, because the consumer's eye won't detect it. The selling point will be a laptop or tablet that lasts 10x longer on a battery charge.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If I'm reading the article right, the chips are still deterministic, they just don't care about a few rare edge cases. So whether there is an error or not depends on the input, and in your case all four chips will make the same mistake. What you could try is modify the input a little for each rerun and try to interpolate the result from that, but that won't give you perfect accuracy.
Which is... math.
Just because something doesn't involve digits doesn't mean it's not math. I suggest you look up analogue computers, because that's what you just described - a neural net acting as an analogue computer.
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BMO