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World's smallest particle accelerator is 54 million times smaller than the Large Hadron Collider, and it works (www.livescience.com)

submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/physics@mander.xyz

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[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's already hardware RNGs on computer chips -- e.g. the RDRAND instruction on most x86 chips from the last decade or so uses a hardware entropy source as part of its behavior. The quality, of course, is one of those things people go "Uh, can I really trust this...?" about though.

Additionally, PRNGs still have uses even if you do trust hardware RNGs; determinism is a very useful property in software -- it is way, way easier to debug something deterministic (by running a PRNG with a specific seed over and over while testing) even if you want the final version to be randomized unpredictably for users. They also tend to be faster.

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve heard that you could pull random numbers from a basic thermometer. Is a hardware RNG just based on measuring the random noise of some measurement like that?

[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

This documentation from Intel says of the entropy source that "The ES runs asynchronously on a self-timed circuit and uses thermal noise within the silicon to output a random stream of bits at the rate of 3 GHz." By thermal noise, I believe they mean this sort of noise but this is not my subject of expertise (I'm a programmer, not an EE or physicist). Not sure what AMD uses, but probably something similar, I'd expect.