Really cool article and I definitely appreciated the section at the end that compared ternary to CMOS.
But in order to use ternary in a real processor, as suggested by the article, we would need a much more formal definition of the voltage levels of the gate.
It's a harder EE problem than you think. For example the Samsung Galaxy S8 was attacked by analyzing video footage of the power LED of Logitech Z120 USB speakers. Those were most certainly on a different power supply and the two were connected by a long wire.
There are circuit level solutions but the solution is not a $0.01 MLCC.
And once you solve the LED problem remember: The S8 was attacked by plugging in a peripheral to it’s 5V USB supply. Imagine if the peripheral was instead a high speed ADC that just measured 5V USB directly…
"We demonstrate the application of video-based cryptanalysis by performing two
side-channel cryptanalytic timing attacks and recover: (1) a 256-
bit ECDSA key from a smart card by analyzing video footage of
the power LED of a smart card reader via a hijacked Internet-connected security camera located 16 meters away from the smart
card reader, and (2) a 378-bit SIKE key from a Samsung Galaxy
S8 by analyzing video footage of the power LED of Logitech Z120
USB speakers that were connected to the same USB hub (that
was used to charge the Galaxy S8) via an iPhone 13 Pro Max."
To all the EEs out there. PSRR and power supply cross talk is a thing...
About three weeks into my first undergraduate class on abstract algebra, it dawned on me that the instructor wasn't giving me math tests. He was giving me vocabulary tests. In that class, most of the answers to questions flow straight from the definitions. Once I broke out the flashcards and started memorizing definitions, that class became almost trivial.
I used flashcards in all my classes after that to memorize terms, definitions, and concepts. Math and engineering are, for me anyway, like a foreign language. To converse in that language fluently, one must be very comfortable with the vocabulary. It just makes sense.
Well put, and I like that analogy. You have to learn the vocabulary, and only then are you well equipped to discuss grammar and finer subtleties of the language. It goes hand in hand.
Patterson and Waterman detail exactly what they we’re thinking during the design of RISCV in the RISCV Reader and Cray is mentioned in multiple places.
Cray gets mentioned in the Reader 3 times, the simplicity quote, the pioneer quote and the timeline comparison with the Iliac-4 (p. 80). Waterman's thesis does actually give some credit:
The CDC 6600 [95] and Cray-1 [82] ISAs, in many respects the precursors to RISC, each had two lengths of instruction, albeit without the redundancy property of the Stretch.
I build infrastructure (raised beds, drainage, chicken runs, composting areas) for our garden and even with that minor engineering get a good look at the level of manufacturing sophistication required to do basic things well, down to the accuracy of our mitre saw (which doesn't reset to 90 degrees very well) or staples that flatten instead of penetrating wood, or the timber I buy that isn't extremely straight. The lumber yard I go to often discards 40% of the timber in a pallet when going through it with me because it's warped or knotted or cracked and can't be used for my needs.
The manufacturing sophistication required to build a reusable space rocket is astonishing and frankly incomprehensible. It'd never be achieved in my country. We have 'barely good enough' materials for the simple stuff, and sophistication of manufacturing stands on the shoulders of layers and layers and layers of other advanced tools and processes and measurements and minute tolerances.
Even building a shed, based on the instructional videos I see on YouTube, in the US is so simple and requires so few corrections for i.e inaccuratly squared plywood. But people shrug off amazing improvements like watches that detect heart palpitations.
What’s tech? I recently had surgery and the surgeon used a robot. I was an out patient the same day and had basically no pain without medication. Compared to a similar surgery I had roughly twenty years ago this experience was like science fiction. Does that count?
This.
The appropriation of “tech” to mean web-first business has gone to our collective heads. Real tech is hard, expensive and mostly progressed by the interplay of science and blue-sky inventions. Not really something easily adaptable to the venture-startup model. We’ve seen a couple of attempts at funding fusion/fission energy along the same lines as SaaS, but honestly, it seems more like a tech-bro indulgence than real technological progress.
Meanwhile the conventional tech industries such as medical equipment, have seen decent progress at the incremental pace of the respective industries. Adding a voice interface to your car, or allowing remote surgery over the net is hardly something we should credit the “tech” companies for.
After 20-some years in the “tech” industry, hoping to get-rich-fast, and THEN do the real tech stuff with that capital, I’m feeling like an extremely well-prepared failure. By now I would do nearly anything for access to a physics lab and funding from a ROI tolerant source. Only problem is that academic funding agencies have been mimicking the “successful” VC model for decades as well…
That’s interesting. In your context what is “knowing the answer”? To me it seems like they “knew” a given statement was true but they didn’t know how to prove it which makes me wonder how they knew.
The teacher may start off a class with a question like "what is the most efficient way to satisfy this problem given these constraints?" Some people would know the answer immediately but couldn't do a proof for it hardly at all. Others could find a proof in class almost every time, but necer really saw the answer to the problem until they'd sat on it for a while and chewed over it.
Can't really give an example question, it's been well over a decade (closer to two) since I took it.
Bad news everyone, modeless isn't buying one. On the other hand I look forward to the steep discounts to be had at Apple's going out of business sale...
This will sell like hot cakes for flight sim consumers, if they could somehow show a virtual cockpit. It will be gone in seconds, flight simmers will pay more than that. I consider myself a starter and I already spent 2k+ just on flight sim hardware.
But in order to use ternary in a real processor, as suggested by the article, we would need a much more formal definition of the voltage levels of the gate.
Something like this: https://www.egr.msu.edu/classes/ece410/mason/files/Ch7.pdf
Without that it’s not clear how one could do timing analysis or do dynamic gate resizing to deal with practical issues like fanout.
Also, without the more formal definition it’s not even clear, to me anyway, what figures like 22 are even measuring.