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'Approximate Computing' Saves Energy
hessian writes "According to a news release from Purdue University, 'Researchers are developing computers capable of "approximate computing" to perform calculations good enough for certain tasks that don't require perfect accuracy, potentially doubling efficiency and reducing energy consumption. "The need for approximate computing is driven by two factors: a fundamental shift in the nature of computing workloads, and the need for new sources of efficiency," said Anand Raghunathan, a Purdue Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who has been working in the field for about five years. "Computers were first designed to be precise calculators that solved problems where they were expected to produce an exact numerical value. However, the demand for computing today is driven by very different applications. Mobile and embedded devices need to process richer media, and are getting smarter – understanding us, being more context-aware and having more natural user interfaces. ... The nature of these computations is different from the traditional computations where you need a precise answer."' What's interesting here is that this is how our brains work."
This is also how analog computers work. They're extremely fast and efficient, but imprecise. It had a bit of traction in the old days, but interest seems to have died off.
Currently Slashdot is displaying ads for me along with the "disable ads" checkbox checked. Perhaps "approximate computing" is farther along than I imagined!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not to mention floating-point computation, numerical analysis, anytime algorithms, and classic randomized algorithms like Monte Carlo algorithms. Approximate computing has been around for ages. The typical scenario is to save computation, nowadays expressed in terms of asymptotic complexity ("Big O"). Sometimes (as is the case with floating point), this tradeoff is necessary to make the problem tractable (e.g., numerical integration is much cheaper than symbolic integration).
The only new idea here is using approximate computing specifically in trading high precision for lower power. The research has less to do with new algorithms and more to do with new applications of classic algorithms.
Currently Slashdot is displaying ads for me along with the "disable ads" checkbox checked. Perhaps "approximate computing" is farther along than I imagined!
Sorry, that was my fault. I didn't have my ad-block disabled. They must have sent them to you instead.
Just send them to me and I will look at it.