SCIENCE

On the grid

Fortunately, video processing seems to fit the bill. Digital images are just big blocks of pixels, which can be split into smaller blocks of pixels, each of which is assigned its own core. If the task is to, say, determine whether the image changes from frame to frame, each core need report only on its own block. The core associated with the top left corner of the image doesn’t need to know what’s happening in the bottom right corner.

Bates has identified a few other problems that his chip also handles well. One is a standard problem in computer science called “nearest-neighbor search,” in which you have a set of objects that can each be described by hundreds or thousands of criteria, and you want to find the one that best matches some sample. Another is computer analysis of protein folding, in which you need to calculate all the different ways in which the different parts of a long biological molecule could interact with each other.

Bob Colwell, who was the chief architect on several of Intel’s Pentium processors and has been a private consultant since 2000, thinks that the most promising application of Bates’ chip could be in human-computer interactions. “There’s a lot of places where the machine does a lot of work on your behalf just to get information in and out of the machine suitable for a human being,” Colwell says. “If you put your hand on a mouse, and you move it a little bit, it really doesn’t matter where exactly the mouse is, because you’re in the loop. If you don’t like where the cursor goes, you’ll move it a little more. Real accuracy in the input is really not necessary.” A system that can tolerate inaccuracy in the input, Colwell, argues can also tolerate (some) inaccuracy in its calculations. The type of graphics processors found in most modern computers are another example, Colwell says, since they work furiously hard to produce 3-D images that probably don’t need to be rendered perfectly.

Bates stresses that his chip would work in conjunction with a standard processor, shouldering a few targeted but labor-intensive tasks, and Colwell says that, depending on how Bates’ chip is constructed, there could be some difficulty in integrating it with existing technologies. But he doesn’t see any of the technical problems as insurmountable. But “there’s going to be a fair amount of people out in the world that as soon as you tell them I’ve got a facility in my new chip that gives sort-of wrong answers, that’s what they’re going to hear no matter how you describe it,” he adds. “That’s kind of a non-technical barrier, but it’s real nonetheless.”