It may be wrong, but it is good enough to run all of our computation at the tran... | Hacker News

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mensetmanusman on March 3, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: What’s Wrong with “Multiplication Is Repeated Addi...

It may be wrong, but it is good enough to run all of our computation at the transistor level :)

The fascinating thing is that now these transistors are helping make new math proofs beyond human comprehension.... how does that come out of addition?

flohofwoe on March 3, 2021 [–]

AFAIK hardware multipliers are not quite as dumb and work more like this though:

5*11 = 5*(8+2+1) = 5*8 + 5*2 + 5*1 = (5<<3) + (5<<1) + (5<<0)

...and then doing all this in parallel.

Instead of:

5*11 = 5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5

;)

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