Communications of the ACM
Hot Trend in Computing: Chips That Sometimes Get It Wrong
Tsinghua University Science Park (TusPark) is located in the Zhongguancun Science Park zone in Beijing.
Credit: LiPo Ching / San Jose Mercury News
At first blush it appears a daft notion: increasing the speed and efficiency of computer processors at the cost of a few computational errors. Nevertheless, as a Houston computer scientist has developed his ideas over nearly a decade, he has found increasing acclaim for his "inexact" computer chips.
This week, at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Cagliari, Italy, Rice University's Krishna Palem unveiled his newest chips that trade a bit of accuracy for better efficiency. The approach is known as probabilistic computing. After Palem and his colleagues demonstrated their prototype chips, they earned "best paper" honors from conference attendees.
"This work opens the door to interesting energy-efficiency opportunities of using inexact hardware together with traditional processing elements," says Paolo Faraboschi, the program co-chair of the conference and a distinguished technologist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.
From Chron.com
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