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

2 points by daly 119 days ago | 5 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.

Someone 119 days 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.

ReptileMan 119 days ago |

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

defrost 119 days ago | |

Mine also.

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

IsTom 119 days ago |

So, they invented the slide rule?

beardyw 119 days ago | |

No, slide rules are more efficient.