'Pruned' microchips are leaner and meaner

If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston’s Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. The removal of portions of circuits that aren’t essential to the task at hand is known as “probabilistic pruning,” and it results in chips that are twice as fast, use half the power, and are half the size of conventional chips.

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