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Super cool.

With the recent paper that apparently shows that ternary data used for AI can be faster and more energy efficient, I am intrigued that someone is experimenting with ternary in hardware.

I am a layman — can a conventional computer architecture be taken and ternary data and instructions grafted on to it? Or does the whole architecture need to be rebuilt from the ground up?

I guess I don't see, for example, any advantage to ternary addressing, only ternary data and operations.






Thanks! Ternary data is definitely more efficient than binary, regardless of your use, not just for AI. I honestly don't know if it's faster, can you give me information on where you read that?

I imagine it's possible even if quite difficult to merge the two architectures, but maybe it's really easier to start everything from scratch as far as hardware is concerned.

What do you mean by ternary addressing? The address bus is also in ternary so even in this case fewer wires and more addresses available!


Probably this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12327

But I suppose searching on "ternary LLM" would find others.


Wondering how negative voltage is routed around in hardware. Does it complicate things more or less than the increased data/addressing efficiency?

I think it is a positive voltage which is interpreted as a negative number.



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