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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 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months 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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months 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.