Harnessing error-prone chips

As transistors get smaller, they also grow less reliable. Increasing their operating voltage can help, but that means a corresponding increase in power consumption. With information technology consuming a steadily growing fraction of the world's energy supplies, some researchers and hardware manufacturers are exploring the possibility of simply letting chips botch the occasional computation. In many popular applications -- video rendering, for instance -- users probably wouldn't notice the difference, and it could significantly improve energy efficiency. At this year's Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that lets programmers identify sections of their code that can tolerate a little error.