This little article caught my eye today, and reminded me of a lecture on parallel computing I recently attended here at Rice. It was given by Dr. Keith Cooper, a good friend of my father's. It was a rather interesting lecture, talking about upcoming problems with parallel computing, such as "what the hell are we gonna do with all this processing power?"
With a wandering mind like mine, of course, that reminded me of another interesting bit of news to come out of rice - a new type of computer chip called PCMOS, which stands for Probabilistic Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) is already used by chipmakers today. Krishna Palem took that concept, and cut power use to the lower bits being processed by the chip. Net result: Significant decrease in the chip's need for power, and lower, less important information (such as pixels in the corner of the screen in a movie, or the cents in your $10,000+ bank summary) may become incorrect.
It really is a new way to look at computers. We're used to computers, when programmed correctly, giving us the correct answers. But in reality, most people don't care to have the exactly correct answer, just a mostly correct answer. You'll see it all the time when one person asks another for the time - 7:33 is "Seven thirty", 5:10 is "Five o'clock", and 8:41 is "Quarter to nine". That's the amount of "wrong" I think you should expect from these new chips, and if it doubles my laptop's battery life, I'm all for it.
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