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

#1

Post by daly » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

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.

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

#2

Post by IsTom » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

So, they invented the slide rule?

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

#3

Post by ReptileMan » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 8:57 AM UTC

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

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

#4

Post by Someone » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by beardyw » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

IsTom wrote: post #2

So, they invented the slide rule?

No, slide rules are more efficient.

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

#6

Post by defrost » Mon, Jan 19, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #3

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

Mine also.

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