

Microchip: 7x faster, 30x less power - superkarn
http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/news2009-02-08-pcmos.shtml

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superkarn
The streaming video example is pretty to understand. But I don't quite follow
the encryption one. Don't you need to be precise with the calculation to
encrypt/decrypt? Or would the advantage here would be mainly for generating
random numbers?

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light3
generating random numbers seems right.. maybe they switch chips when accuracy
matters, or maybe they don't care if some of the output gets mangled since the
human can 'ignore' the mistakes.

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nihilocrat
I wonder if you have to program them any differently...

sometimes_print("Hello World! I guess, at least in this case...");

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quantumhobbit
Maybe you could have 3 processors running the same code. You could repeat any
steps that resulted in disagreement between processors. If the 30x less power
claim is true, you would still be saving ~10x the energy(Less than 10x due to
repeated calculations and inter-processor communication).

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kurtosis
Wow this sounds very intriguing but I have no idea where to start learning
about this. I tried reading some of the papers and was quickly overwhelmed.
Anyone have any suggestions for how to start experimenting with this? Are
there any VHDL like kits for doing probabilistic logic?

Is there any hope of there being dev kits made that would allow one to
experiment cheaply? I want to try and see if this gives any advantages for
monte-carlo algorithms.

