Extropic Is Building Thermodynamic Computing Hardware

It's just miniaturized lava lamps.

"Just a funny story about random numbers: in the early days of computers people wanted to have random numbers for Monte Carlo simulations and stuff like that and so a great big wonderful computer was being designed at MIT’s Lincoln laboratory. It was the largest fastest computer in the world called TX2 and was to have every bell and whistle possible: a display screen that was very fancy and stuff like that. And they decided they were going to solve the random number problem, so they included a register that always yielded a random number; this was really done carefully with radioactive material and Geiger counters, and so on. And so whenever you read this register you got a truly random number, and they thought: “This is a great advance in random numbers for computers!” But the experience was contrary to their expectations! Which was that it turned into a great disaster and everyone ended up hating it: no one writing a program could debug it, because it never ran the same way twice, so ... This was a bit of an exaggeration, but as a result everybody decided that the random number generators of the traditional kind, i.e., shift register sequence generated type and so on, were much better. So that idea got abandoned, and I don’t think it has ever reappeared."

RIP Ed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin

I was skeptical of Extropic from the start, but what they've shown here exceeded my low expectations. They've made real hardware which is novel and potentially useful in the future after a lot more R&D. Analog computing implemented in existing CMOS processes that can run AI more efficiently by four orders of magnitude would certainly be revolutionary. That final outcome seems far enough away that this should probably still be the domain of university research labs rather than a venture-backed startup, but I still applaud the effort and wish them luck.

The Web site of Extropic claims that their hardware devices are made with standard CMOS technology, which cannot make magnetic tunnel junctions.

So it appears that there is no connection between the linked article and what Extropic does.

The idea of stochastic computation is not at all new. I have read about such stochastic computers as a young child, more than a half of century ago, long before personal computers. The research on them was inspired by the hypotheses about how the brain might work.

Along with analog computers, stochastic computers were abandoned due to the fast progress of deterministic digital computers, implemented with logic integrated circuits.

So anything new cannot be about the structure of stochastic computers, which has been well understood for decades, but only about a novel extremely compact hardware RNG device, which could be scaled to a huge number of RNG devices per stochastic computer.

I could not find during a brief browsing of the Extropic site any description about the principle of their hardware RNG, except that it is made with standard CMOS technology. While there are plenty of devices made in standard CMOS that can be used as RNG, they are not reliable enough for stochastic computation (unless you use complex compensation circuits), so Extropic must have found some neat trick to avoid using complex circuitry, assuming that their claims are correct.

However I am skeptical about their claims because of the amount of BS words used on their pages, which look like taken from pseudo-scientific Star Trek-like mumbo-jumbo, e.g. "thermodynamic computing", "accelerated intelligence", "Extropic" derived from "entropic", and so on.

To be more clear, there is no such thing as "thermodynamic computing" and inventing such meaningless word combinations is insulting for the potential customers, as it demonstrates that the Extropic management believes that they must be naive morons.

The traditional term for such computing is "stochastic computing". "Stochastics" is an older, and in my opinion better, alternative name for the theory of probabilities. In Ancient Greek, "stochastics" means the science of guessing. Instead of "stochastic computing" one can say "probabilistic computing", but not "thermodynamic computing", which makes no sense (unless the Extropic computers are dual use, besides computing, they also provide heating and hot water for a great number of houses!).

Like analog computers, stochastic computers are a good choice only for low-precision computations. With increased precision, the amount of required hardware increases much faster for analog computers and for stochastic computers than for deterministic digital computers.

The only currently important application that is happy even with precisions under 16 bit is AI/ML, so trying to market their product for AI applications is normal for Extropic, but they should provide more meaningful information about what advantages their product might have.

I really like the design of it though.

It's the one attached to my TV that just runs movies/YT - I don't recall the last time I heard the fans.