Technology

The thing which makes digital chips so much better than analog chips is something both you and the article are missing: noise. A digital chip is very robust against noise, as long as the noise in one step isn't too big so it causes a bitflip immediately the stable configuration will pull the voltage level back and no information is lost. Not so with analog logic, since the information is continuous every step which introduces noice (which is basically every step) will cause loss of information. Go a few levels of logic deep and all you've got left is noise.

To be clear though, the two defined states are separated by a voltage gap, so either it is on or off regardless of how on or how off. For example, if the off is 0V and the on is 5V then 4V is neither of those but will be either considered as on. So if it is above thecriticam threshold it is on and therefore represents a 1, otherwise it is a 0.

An analogue computer would be able to use all of the variable voltage range. This means that instead of having a whole bunch of gates working together to represent a number the voltage could be higher or lower. Something that takes 64 bits could be a single voltage. That would mean more processing in the same space and much less actual computation required.

This is an analog pc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer

It does seem to be talking about this, analog doesn't from my understanding use 1 or 0 as a representation. It is true that the cpu uses voltage as you stated, but what differentiates it from analog is that in analog the volatge isn't represented as 0 or 1 and is used as is in calculations.

They are not programmed, they are physically made to preform the calculation from my understanding, like for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Normal one and zero transistors can hold their state for a while only needing refresh cycles at intervals.
Seems logical to me that it's harder to hold values of greater variance, which is probably also why everything works with binary systems, and not a single vendor has chips that use bits with for instance 3 or 4 states.
What would be most obvious if this wasn't a problem would be to make a decimal based computer. There's a reason we don't have that, except by using 4 bits wasting 6 values, which is very wasteful.

Here's a Veritasium video from 3 years ago about an American company making analog chips, explaining why they are so much more efficient in certain tasks. https://youtu.be/GVsUOuSjvcg

It is not an incremental improvement because it's a radically different approach. This is not like making a new CPU architecture or adding more IPC, it's doing computation in a whole different way, that is closer to a physical model using springs/gravity/gears/whatever to model something like the Antikythera mechanism or those water-based financial models than any digital computer.

Also, uncritically dismissing anything coming from China as a scam is not being resistant to Chinese propaganda, it's just falling for the US'.

“1000x faster?” Learn to lie better

Analogue computers are indeed capable of doing a task 1000x faster than a regular computer. The difference is they do only that task, in a very specific way, and with one specific type of output. You can 3D print at home an "analogue computer" that can solve calculus equations, it can technically be faster than a CPU, but that's the only thing it can do, it's complex, and the output is a drawing on paper.

If you come up with a repeatable and precise set of mechanical movements that are analogous to the problem you want to solve, you can indeed come up with headlines like that.

Because until it hits market, it’s almost meaningless. These journalists do the same shit with drugs in trials or early research.

Which is worse - AI slop, or people decrying everything they see as AI slop, even when it isn't?

@carrylex @kalkulat If you zoom in, you will see that it is in fact a real photo. It's just someone who thought putting a CPU upside down was a good idea.

Same here. I wait to see real life calculations done by such circuits. They won't be able to e.g. do a simple float addition without losing/mangling a bunch of digits.

But maybe the analog precision is sufficient for AI, which is an imprecise matter from the start.

I mean it‘s like the 10th time I‘m reading about THE breakthrough in Chinese chip production on Lemmy so lets just say I‘m not holding my breath LoL.

I would imagine there's a kernel of truth to it. It's probably correct, but for one rarely used operation, or something like that. It's not a total revolution. It's something that could be included to speed up a very particular task. Like GPUs are much better at matrix math than the CPU, so we often have that in addition to the CPU, which can handle all tasks, but isn't as fast for those particular ones.

Yes. Please remember to downvote this post and all others that are based on overblown articles from nobody science blogs.