Tesla Patent Don't multiply, add. It saves time and energy

2 pointsdaly2mo ago5 comments

Tesla has filed a patent "High Precision Complex Number Based Rotary Positional Encoding Calculation On 8-Bit Compute Hardware" (US20260017019)

There are several ideas in the patent but it appears that this work will be available in the latest AI5 chip. A good introduction is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG9yOsPEGek

One of the key ideas is to use logarithms and addition rather than multiplication. Faster and less power needed.

NVIDIA is going to hurt from this.

5 comments

Someone2mo ago

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US47... doesn’t mention “8-bit” at all, so why did they put “on 8-bit Compute hardware” in the title?

Seems it could at least slightly open up the world for doing it on 9-bit Compute hardware or (partially) in software, for example.

ReptileMan2mo ago

My mother has used such manually operating machine in the late 60s. It was called the slide ruler or something.

defrost2mo ago

Mine also.

Truly what goes around, comes around: https://www.instructables.com/Circular-Slide-Rule/

IsTom2mo ago

So, they invented the slide rule?

beardyw2mo ago

No, slide rules are more efficient.

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