Analog Computing

Digital is great, but analog compute is super neat! The idea that one can use physical mechanical components for doing calculations?! I had no idea this was a thing until recently.

What are some practical modern applications for analog compute?

Thermostatic valve :smiley:

Joke aside, analogue computing is what was before digital, and one of it’s main drawback is that every physical part reduce the output definition by it’s own physical construct.

This make reliability in result a huge pain in the butt, and made digital development worth it until now.

I don’t see it changing for a while.

2 Likes

I doubt they are ever gonna “take over”, if anything they will become a accelerator like GPU’s.

Still very cool though :smiley:

1 Like

Analog is not easily reproducible.

Even the same machine made to the same specs will have small differences in them. This means you need a ton off correcting machinery, because what good is a computer that might count 2+2=5, 3, 4 or 26 depending on the machine in question?

In computer space you need to be predictable and repeatable. Analog makes both difficult.

2 Likes

I think the real use case is what IBM wanted to do, where you use analog circuits for making synthetic neurons.

In this case, you take in a bunch of analog inputs, and you get out a weighted analog/boolean output. Then, if the network is trained using the final hardware, it should self-correct whatever non-linearities are present.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.