Chips That Flow With Probabilities, Not Bits 153
holy_calamity writes "Boston company Lyric Semiconductor has taken the wraps off a microchip designed for statistical calculations that eschews digital logic. It's still made from silicon transistors. But they are arranged gates that compute with analogue signals representing probabilities, not binary bits. That makes it easier to implement calculations of probabilities, says the company, which has a chip for correcting errors in flash memory claimed to be 30 times smaller than a digital logic-based equivalent."
Re:Analog Computers (Score:2, Interesting)
Probability computing is not analog computing. Nor is it digital. Nor is it limited to error correction and search engines. It's a new implementation of a mathematical concept that allows arbitrary logic to be implemented smaller and faster than traditional digital chips.
Calling it analog is an insult.
Re:Analog computers live again!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Just like nobody needs enough vector float computations and SIMD instructions at once to justify making a card unit that does a @$%#$ ton of them at once. This chip, in a PCIE card could make a lot of sense.
Mod shit down (Score:2, Interesting)
It's got absolutely nothing to do with analog computers. At all. The first application cited is even digital storage.
Re:Analog Computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Being able to do it on silicon should mean they can make them cheaply and quickly with existing fab gear. I could see these being a lot of fun for tinkerers.
Sure, you can make them cheap. But QA could be a bitch, I imagine. Simply ensuring that all used gates operate linear within a small error margin should be hard. And how you gonna give error margins for each output it calculated? After all, it's analog not digital.
Sounds like a bitstream chip, but with more issues (Score:2, Interesting)
It's vaguely familiar, but since no two circuits are *truly* identical at the analog layer, *and* change as the temperature changes, people used digital instead where 'mostly 0' is still '0' and 'mostly 1' is still '1' regardless. Otherwise you can't mass produce them.
Of more interest is people using analog-alike bitstreams, where the average number of 1's vs 0's in a random stream is the amplitude of the analog wave. They then blend the input streams together to produce the output stream. I've mostly seen this done by Royal Holloway University to produce neural chips that *don't* need squillions of interconnections - they just blend probability streams. Looks like people are playing with optical ones now too. Why not put a story up about that instead?
Re:Analog Computers (Score:3, Interesting)
It would seem that they have reinvented the analog computer, but this time entirely on a chip.
Actually it would be sweet to have an equivalent to a CPLD or FPGA [wikipedia.org] for analog electronics, where an entire analog sub-system could be reduced to a single chip, reducing the cost and board real estate for usage in low-cost electronics, reduce noise levels. Many it's my math background, or working in scientific computing, but being able to work natively with continuous number versus discrete representation that are often only approximate (a la floating point number in a digital computer), would be nice.
If such a computing device could be scaled up in "logical unit" density and speed like we've seen with digital computers, they could prove useful in a number of applications. Depending on the quality of noise (undefined or unintentional variation in numeric values), and its management, it might prove fruitful for scientific simulation such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, and any other model of physical conditions which are more accurately in continuous numbers (i.e. the Real [wikipedia.org] number domain).
Re:Mod shit down (Score:3, Interesting)
It's got absolutely nothing to do with analog computers.
Really? Because the Fine Article from the OP, says:
Internally, Lyric's probability gates are essentially analog devices typically working with analog values called pbits that have a digital resolution of approximately 8-bits although the approach is applicable for different resolutions as well.
"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.
While electronic analog computers [wikipedia.org] are primarily considered rare [science.uva.nl] artifacts [caltech.edu] these days, analog electronics still exist, and continue to be used in various applications where an embedded computer is either overkill (no need for a re-programmable computer, application is trivial in analog), or less suitable (few very simple evaluations at very high speeds).
Re:Oh looksy me's got a quantum computer (Score:3, Interesting)
No, because it doesn't directly use entanglement and superposition.
Like your car uses electricity, but it's probably not an electric car.
Re:Analog Computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the article doesn't say that at all. In fact, it gives virtually no indication about how these new devices work. An analog computer uses op amps to solve differential equations. I highly, highly doubt that is what this new device is doing.
Re:Analog Computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Forgot your introductory digital design courses already?
I think you forgot your analog circuit class. Functionally speaking, an inverter is no different than a high-gain, rail-to-rail voltage controlled op-amp. It's just far more susceptible to noise and has a very distorted IV curve. The reason digital has taken on so much popularity is that since you're either railing the amplifier to its VDD rail or GND rail and don't care about the in-betweens, you can use very small, very fast and sometimes lower power transistors and not care about how well the transistor performs when amplifying anything in between.
Analog circuits have to have very precise shaping of Vin-to-Vout, Vin-to-Iout, Iin-Vout, or Iin-Iout. Hence they're usually a lot bigger, and a lot more power hungry (if you want speed) or a lot slower (if you want low power).
That being said, for certain types of applications (for instance, statistical convolution) it may be faster in the end to use a slower, larger analog transistor and use fewer of them at lower speeds to do the same thing as a lot of smaller, faster digital transistors.
But it takes more time to design and is difficult to change and scale to smaller geometries.