Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator
There are two possibilities, and for the briefest of moments, the circuit hovers between them. In a perfect world, it might linger like that forever. But in reality, even a small amount of thermal noise—random atomic vibrations—within the circuitry will send it racing toward one of its two stable states. It's the physically random properties of the thermal noise that determine the outcome of this otherwise indecisive circuit.
In this way, our simple digital circuit can easily harvest some of the ubiquitous randomness of nature. All we need to do is to connect those two extra transistors to a clock that regularly turns both of them on and off. Every time the clock cycles, the circuit generates one random bit.
Generating truly random numbers has always been an impossible task in software, where everything can be at best pseudorandom. Intel engineers have set out to solve it with hardware and the resulting circuit is already present in Ivy Bridge processors.
Link via @adam_craven.
