

Less precise processors may increase battery life - dkokelley
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=emerging08&id=20246

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BrandonM
I understand sound and video processing and even machine learning
applications, but in what way is encryption probabilistic (other than trying
to guess passwords)?

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dkokelley
I don't know too much about it, but I would assume that generating random
values would be more efficient if it was built into hardware than if the
software had to process it. So, instead of running through calculations to
come up with multiple random values, it would be a streamlined because the
processor would have it hard wired in.

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BrandonM
Ahh, that I can see, but is the bottleneck in encryption really in generating
the random numbers? I guess the part of encryption I was focusing on is the
part that does heavy-duty bit-crunching during the actual
encryption/decryption process, which _must_ be exact if you want to get back
the same data you started with.

