Headline Nov 06, 2014/

''' *SLOPPY* MICROCHIPS '''

MANY A BADGE OF HONOUR! : I dare, say.

Over the last two days and a half, I found all my Internet access paths both disabled and blocked.

Be assured that I will take the matter up both with the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of Pakistan.

To mark the occasion with a protest, Rabo, D,  to display a black miniature lining on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless.

Oh, that is near enough, but now I return to the operational research.

Now letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient. And in that regard,

ANOTHER trick is called  ''prunning''.

Chips are wired so more power is delivered to more important areas, while areas that compute  non-essential data  -or are infrequently used- 

Are given less power or simply removed altogether.

Tests at CSEM by Avinash Lingamneni  found that that pruned circuits were twice as fast, consumed half as much energy and were half the size of conventional circuits.

Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that the errors are do not cause any problems.

The result of a mathematical calculation, for example, need not always be calculated precisely   -an accuracy of two or three decimal places is often enough. 

Dr Palem offers the analogy of person about to cross a big room.

Rather than wasting time and energy calculating the shortest path, it's better just to start walking in roughly the right direction.

Well, I think, that perfection is overrated.

The microprocessor that powers a laptop typically contains more than two billions transistors, but it could run just fine with one-eighth or even more of them producing sloppy results, says Mr Lingamneni.

The key is to ensure that sloppy circuitry used only for certain tasks.

It is not acceptable if one file is attached to an  e-mail  but another file ends up being sent.

Can information that must be processed accurately be kept away from the faster, sloppier circuits?

Mr Lingamneni thinks it can, CSEM is developing an error-prone chip for audio-visual processing in mobile phones that dispatches different processing tasks to the appropriate circuitry.

The voltage is reduced in parts of the chip that finish calculations faster or with greater accuracy than necessary.

Other parts of the chip, where more important calculations are made, operate at higher voltage and with fewer errors.

Another approach to managing errors, called  ''asymmetric reliability''  uses error-prone circuits for number crunching to save power and run faster, says:

Subhasish Mitra, a Computer Scientist at Stanford University.

Conventional circuits are then used to spot and weed out unacceptable errors.

His work funded by America's Department of Defence and companies including Bosch, Cisco, infineon, Intel Semiconductor Research Corporation, Samsung and Texas Instruments.

With this technique, the mechanics computing become more akin to to those of human thought, says Joseph Bates of Singular Computing, a firm based on Newton, Massachusetts. 

The Honour and Serving of the operational research continues. Thank you for reading and see you on the following post.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the United States of America. See Ya all Sirs, on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

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'''Good Night and God Bless

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