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 year ago
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 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.