3 ms·

Can’t you use ternary internally but exposed binary to the system?

• kmeisthax 4y ago
  That'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 ago
      That is mercifully less awful than the first thing I thought of.
      • moloch-hai 4y ago
        Three of those would be unusual, but there is a name for it: supernumerary.
  • pedrocr 4y ago
    RAM 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.