[HN Gopher] Working Ternary ALU (2019)
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       Working Ternary ALU (2019)
        
       Author : g0xA52A2A
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2023-07-01 08:14 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (louis-dr.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (louis-dr.github.io)
        
       | pandaman wrote:
       | There had been working ternary computers made in the USSR[1] 60
       | years ago, though, as far as I know, they still had binary memory
       | (2 ferrite bits were used to store each "trit") and that was
       | quite a waste.
       | 
       | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
        
       | dvwobuq wrote:
       | Really cool article and I definitely appreciated the section at
       | the end that compared ternary to CMOS.
       | 
       | But in order to use ternary in a real processor, as suggested by
       | the article, we would need a much more formal definition of the
       | voltage levels of the gate.
       | 
       | Something like this:
       | https://www.egr.msu.edu/classes/ece410/mason/files/Ch7.pdf
       | 
       | Without that it's not clear how one could do timing analysis or
       | do dynamic gate resizing to deal with practical issues like
       | fanout.
       | 
       | Also, without the more formal definition it's not even clear, to
       | me anyway, what figures like 22 are even measuring.
        
       | pyrolistical wrote:
       | RE: radix economy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-02 23:01 UTC)