The other one is having functional instruction packet transactions that they can retry somewhere else if they fail during processing.
With these changes, the CPUs will always be operating at some pre determined error rate regime. No more over clocking, just change the AER (allowable error rate) register, which also will be a thing for simulations that don't matter like games and that do matter like Excel handling your payroll.
In general, this concept is called "good enough computing"; periodically, people think about it, and then brush it by the wayside. But it is a neat thought experiment, even if nothing else!
We already do this with SP, DP, EP, bignum, arbitrary precision and algorithms that are precision tolerant so I am not sure how much of an advantage it would have.
One idea I had would be to decompile a high performance benchmark and then synthesize microbenchmarks for groups of basic blocks to get instruction packet timing for various FP operations and then model the distribution in speedups from use lower precision math.
These papers look interesting
How literal is the 'warm up' for the vector units? I've occasionally seen this effect mentioned with regard to microbenchmarking, but never understood why this might be. Are vector units actually slowly activated over several cycles so as to reduce voltage droop?
There can be many other kinds of run-ups to steady state happening in processors for microbenchmarks. Caches/TLBs, branch predictors, clock gating, macro scale voltage/frequency scaling, memory prefetching, power management in the system outside cpu, etc.
Tech Report [1] says the FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator) is for:
• higher efficiency, lower voltage ripple
• cleaner power delivery [closer to the load, and controlled by Intel]
• very high frequency, to 140 MHz. This one seems relevant, reacting faster to dI/dt events
• the only apparent downside is that with more things in one package the thermal load is higher, but bear in mind haswell's very low overall power usage
[1] http://techreport.com/news/24802/leaked-slides-expose-haswel...
