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DARPA's Latest Chip Is Designed To Be Bad At Arithmetic (technologyreview.com)
Reader holy_calamity writes: Pentagon research agency DARPA has funded the creation of a chip incapable of correct arithmetic, in the hope of making computers better at understanding the real world. A chip that can't guarantee that every calculation is perfect can still get good results on many problems but needs fewer circuits and burns less energy, says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing. The S1 chip can process noisy data like video very efficiently because it doesn't need the extra circuits or operations needed to ensure every mathematical operation is performed perfectly. This summer DARPA will put five prototype computers, each equipped with 16 of the inexact S1 chips, online for researchers to experiment with.
Yes, I guess you can make arithmetics slightly faster when you allow errors, but is that where todays CPUs spend a lot of time?
Not so much in error checking, but in the choice of the algorithm itself.
As an example, Quake 3 famously used a crazy-fast inverse square root routine. It didn't give an exact answer, but rather, one "close enough" to suit its intended purpose (calculating surface normals for reflections) in software, in a quarter of the time FPUs of the era could get an answer using dedicated hardware. The FPU would always give a much more accurate answer, but not every use needs a much more accurate answer.
Thanks for jumping to conclusions, but I happen to have a BS in Civil Engineering, so I've done my share of math. I also have 4 children currently ranging from HS to College level and all have experienced Common Core to varying degrees. I did my homework when Common Core was first being discussed and all the way through it being shoved down my childrens' and their teachers' throats, have you? It was approved by one individual to the outcry of every single other person on the review board. It's complete and utter rubbish. Anytime you'd like to sit down and solve a complex math problem using your Common Core vs my usage of Common Sense, please let me know. I'll even give you a 10 minute head start.