'Pruned' Microchips Twice As Fast and Efficient 127
Zothecula writes "If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston's Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. The removal of portions of circuits that aren't essential to the task at hand is known as 'probabilistic pruning,' and it results in chips that are twice as fast, use half the power, and are half the size of conventional chips."
Re:Hm (Score:4, Interesting)
They aren't cutting out entire blocks of ASIC circuitry in a Boolean keep or remove decision. They are sacrificing precision by reducing transistor count, and doing so in a somewhat heuristic approach in order to limit the loss of precision. Their algorithm will explore the worst case and best case of each arithmetic operation in order to achieve this. Not too different from the MiniMax approach to playing Chess or other board games.
That's fine ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... for a specific application, like a hearing aid. Not so good for microprocessors intended for general purpose use (broad markets).
If you have sufficient market volume, you can afford to produce some sort of 'application specific integrate circuit'. Hmm, an ASIC. Now there's a novel idea (putting on jacket to make a dash to the patent office).
Madman Muntz famous(and rich)for this last century (Score:5, Interesting)
From Wikipedia entry on Madman Muntz:
Re:Hm (Score:5, Interesting)