Future Computer Chips Will Make More Mistakes (And That's a Good Thing)
Scientists have made a curious breakthrough in computer chip technology. They’ve discovered that if you “prune” a chip’s design–chopping off little-used functions and actually allowing it to make errors–it can result in far more power efficient and smaller designs. This breakthrough could be crucial for mobile electronics.
The team performing this research comes from the U.S., Singapore and Switzerland, but it’s headed up by Krishna Palem, professor of computing at Rice University in Houston. He’s noted that this might be the first time a research team has taken an integrated circuit and stated “let’s get rid of the part we do not need.” This approach has been used successfully in coding. Specifically in “reduced instruction set computing,” which disposes of complex processor-level instructions, trading them for multiple simpler codes that are more efficient. That was the initial secret behind the success of ARM, famous for its low-power, efficient chips. The team is revealing the technique at the European DATE11 chip design conference this week.
The research team tested their ideas by taking a chip design and prototyping it on an experimental silicon slice, alongside an identical but “pruned” version to compare their performance. The results are impressive: Some test designs were twice as fast as the initial chips, using around half the electrical energy, and taking up about half as much space on the silicon substrate.
The increased error rates mean the idea is not applicable to all sorts of chip design–you’re unlikely to see the processor in your iPhone benefiting, but other task-specific applications like audio processors or video processors could easily benefit, which could result in important power savings on the complete circuits of portable devices. When you are speaking about smaller hearing aids that can run four times as long on the same sort of battery technology, this is a serious boon.
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Submited at Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 11:00 am on Uncategorized by chuck
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