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Re:Mistakes in silicon chips could help boost computer power by reitzensteinm on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @09:09AM (#1377291)
I always imagined that this would work by doubling up the hardware, requiring two logic units to agree, if they didn't then computation work would be redone, much like a branch prediction failing.

This would obviously not help power consumption at all, but freqeuncy could probably be scaled up quite a bit.

It also assumes that if an error happens it's unlikely to repeat in the same way in the second logic unit. But that may not be a reasonable assumption.

Re:Mistakes in silicon chips could help boost computer power by gdickie on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @09:38AM (#1377364)
At the lowest level, you don't need to double-up, you can use an error correcting code. If the memories and registers on a chip use a multiple-error correcting code, then the underlying error rate could be quite high without making any difference in the user-visible error rate.

Similarly you could use noisy-network protocols for on-chip wires, so that each signal path doesn't need to be perfect. Again you don't need to double-up. Instead you lose a small percent to overhead, and a delay in order to encode / decode.

Re:Mistakes in silicon chips could help boost computer power by reitzensteinm on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @10:07AM (#1377447)
How would the error correcting code work for something like a floating point multiplication? Correcting errors in storage is simple, but correcting errors in computation seems like a significantly harder problem.