4 ms·
Here I was, hoping for ternary RAM: 1/0/-1. Didn't Burroughs field a ternary machine, once?
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Here I was, hoping for ternary RAM: 1/0/-1. Didn't Burroughs field a ternary machine, once?
- shrubble 4y agoThere was a Soviet computer called Setun (Сетунь) which used ternary logic, though I can't find much in English about it (and my Russian is very poor).
- moloch-hai 4y agoThank you, that is probably what I too-vaguely recalled. Burroughs is usually the go-to, in the West, for wacky architecture. If B. could have made a reliable card reader, they might have survived longer.
- thanatos519 4y agoI thought I was going to have to keep track of each stick's chosen personal pronoun.
- nine_k 4y agoTernary is fun but hard to integrate with existing systems. The headline made me think about storing two bits per cell, like MLC flash does, with 4 levels of charge instead if 2.
- cm2187 4y agoCan’t you use ternary internally but exposed binary to the system?
- kmeisthax 4y agoThat's what PAM-4 signaling does. Quaternary signals can be easily broken up to binary ones on the other end because the bits divide cleanly. For the same reason why hexadecimal encodes binary very well. Signalling systems that don't divide cleanly into a number of bits are more complicated to work with; you need to group bits together into another group of terts[0] and assign states to each. It's less like "picking the bits between the bits out" and more like MFM/GCR encoding for magnetic media. [0] Ternary digits. No clue what the official name is for these but I am not going to go with the obvious choice.
- vikingerik 4y ago"Trit" is often the name, abbreviated from "trinary digit". (Trinary and ternary are interchangeable.)
- kmeisthax 4y agoThat is mercifully less awful than the first thing I thought of.
- moloch-hai 4y agoThree of those would be unusual, but there is a name for it: supernumerary.
- pedrocr 4y agoRAM works on a wide set of bits per transfer so if you're using ternary the mapping will waste very little. Encoding 64 bits in ternary only wastes half a bit in the mapping for example which is less than 1% waste and thus irrelevant. It would even be a good moment to do a mapping that includes ECC by default as ternary signal integrity may very well be trickier and all RAM should have ECC anyway.
- allenrb 4y agoSame. Alas, sensing the contents of a DRAM cell in the time allotted is already a tough ask. Having to discriminate between multiple voltage levels would surely make have a nasty latency impact. OTOH, I believe DRAM senses entire rows at a time -- so after that latency hit, bandwidth might be unchanged. Any idea if it is even possible with existing capacitive DRAM cells?
- moloch-hai 4y agoFlash commonly uses 2-bit, 4-level cells.
- nailer 4y agoCould we have decimal RAM? (thinking emoji)
- marshray 4y agoSure, many early computer architectures were built this way. Forgive me for being an old guy, but how would that facilitate emoji? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer
- charcircuit 4y agoPutting a thinking emoji at the end of a message signifies that you are proposing an idea that you are still thinking about. His message facilitated the emoji because he has not fully thought out what decimal ram would entail before sending his post.
- marshray 4y agoOMG, lol. Thank you for not making fun of me. More. Coffee. Required.
- moloch-hai 4y agoSame.
- nailer 4y agoIt’s OK, maybe it was obscure, I just wish HN supported emoji - right now it silently deletes them.