Unreliable chips as an opportunity in computer design

(MIT, November 03, 2013)

As transistors get smaller, they also become less reliable. So far, computer-chip designers have been able to work around that problem, but in the future, it could mean that computers stop improving at the rate we’ve come to expect. A third possibility is that we could simply let our computers make more mistakes. If, for instance, a few pixels in each frame of a high-definition video are improperly decoded, viewers probably won’t notice — but relaxing the requirement of perfect decoding could yield gains in speed or energy efficiency. In anticipation of the dawning age of unreliable chips, MIT researchers have developed a new programming framework that enables software developers to specify when errors may be tolerable.