Top computer boffins have worked out that is really important for a computer to make a few mistakes. According to the BBC, Silicon chips that are allowed to make mistakes could help ensure computers continue to get more powerful.

Researchers suggest relaxing the rules governing how they work and when they work correctly could mean they use less power and get a performance boost. It will need special software to use the buggy chips but generally it will be better for all. Professor Asen Asenov from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow said that unreliability of chips is a problem that many researchers were trying to deal with. As chips shrink they get more unreliable.

But Professor Rakesh Kumar at University of Illinois the demise of Moore's Law is being hastened by an insistence on making silicon chips operate flawlessly. He said that the pursuit of perfection forces manufacturers to make some poor choices. To make sure that everything is working correctly you need too much power, he said. This pushes up manufacturing costs because many chips have to be discarded if they fall short.

Kumar said that rather than trying to eliminate flaws the industry should use "stochastic processors" that are subject to random errors. Kumar and his minions are designing processors that forgo flawlessness. Instead they attempt to manage the number and type of errors so they can be coped with efficiently.

Depending on how many errors a designer is prepared to tolerate, power consumption can be cut by up to 30 per cent he said. With only 1 per cent error rates, power can be cut by 23%. In most cases the errors will not have a significant impact on the workings of a computer. In other cases, he said, they could cause a system to crash. To deal with this Kumar is researching ways to make applications more tolerant of mistakes. (He should try designing women as well. sub.ed.)