4 ms·

Someone I worked for a while ago would have summed this up as: "a cure for no known disease". I know a little about CMOS transistor and logic design, but I'm c

Someone I worked for a while ago would have summed this up as: "a cure for no known disease". I know a little about CMOS transistor and logic design, but I'm certainly no expert. Still, I'm not seeing the advantages of ternary numbers. I'd be interested in hearing otherwise. At today's geometries we have a hard enough time keeping binary gates and memory cells working reliably. Ternary just doesn't seem to be practical. Perhaps with another supply voltage? E.g. +1.5, 0, -1.5? But today's CPUs very very aggressively vary supply voltage in order to conserve power. Now they'd have to fiddle with two voltages? Bah!

SixSigma 12y ago
Think hard drives - bit density = capacity
databass 12y ago
Ternary (or even higher n-ary) storage is already widely used: multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs store more than one bit per cell by using multiple voltages (most commonly 4, i.e. 2 bits per cell). I believe Ethernet also uses 3 voltage levels.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Communication systems in general routinely have up to 1024 modulation symbols (32 voltage levels for both the sin and cos carrier). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation#Quantized_QAM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation...
PhantomGremlin 12y ago
Let me elaborate on my post, since it has been misinterpreted. I was responding to the ideas in the article. I of course understand the advantages of non-binary encodings in the many applications people mentioned, e.g. hard disks, flash memory, etc. Another common use is digital cable, which generally uses 256-QAM. But let's look at the article itself, which was discussing ternary for general purpose CPU design. Here's a snippet: the first working ternary computer was ... designed by Nikolai P. Brusentsov and his colleagues at Moscow State University ... Some 50 machines were built between 1958 and 1965. [It] operated on numbers composed of 18 ternary digits, or trits ... I stand by what I first said. The above computers were probably wonderful academic toys, but otherwise were "a cure for no known disease". Neither Intel nor anyone else will build a CPU with registers that store ternary numbers. Nor will they build cache memory that stores ternary numbers. Nor will there be any new ARM architecture forthcoming that switches from binary to ternary. Etc.

SixSigma 12y ago

Think hard drives - bit density = capacity

databass 12y ago

Ternary (or even higher n-ary) storage is already widely used: multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs store more than one bit per cell by using multiple voltages (most commonly 4, i.e. 2 bits per cell). I believe Ethernet also uses 3 voltage levels.

darkmighty 12y ago
Communication systems in general routinely have up to 1024 modulation symbols (32 voltage levels for both the sin and cos carrier). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation#Quantized_QAM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation...

PhantomGremlin 12y ago

Let me elaborate on my post, since it has been misinterpreted. I was responding to the ideas in the article. I of course understand the advantages of non-binary encodings in the many applications people mentioned, e.g. hard disks, flash memory, etc. Another common use is digital cable, which generally uses 256-QAM. But let's look at the article itself, which was discussing ternary for general purpose CPU design. Here's a snippet: the first working ternary computer was ... designed by Nikolai P. Brusentsov and his colleagues at Moscow State University ... Some 50 machines were built between 1958 and 1965. [It] operated on numbers composed of 18 ternary digits, or trits ... I stand by what I first said. The above computers were probably wonderful academic toys, but otherwise were "a cure for no known disease". Neither Intel nor anyone else will build a CPU with registers that store ternary numbers. Nor will they build cache memory that stores ternary numbers. Nor will there be any new ARM architecture forthcoming that switches from binary to ternary. Etc.