this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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China solves 'century-old problem' with new analog chip that is 1,000 times faster than high-end Nvidia GPUs (www.livescience.com)
submitted 1 week ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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"The new device is built from arrays of resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells.... The team was able to combine the speed of analog computation with the accuracy normally associated with digital processing. Crucially, the chip was manufactured using a commercial production process, meaning it could potentially be mass-produced."

Article is based on this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

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[–] TWeaK@lemmy.today 25 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Okay, I'm starting to think this article doesn't really know what it's talking about...

For most of modern computing history, however, analog technology has been written off as an impractical alternative to digital processors. This is because analog systems rely on continuous physical signals to process information — for example, a voltage or electric current. These are much more difficult to control precisely than the two stable states (1 and 0) that digital computers have to work with.

1 and 0 are in fact representative of voltages in digital computers. Typically, on a standard IBM PC, you have 3.3V, 5V and 12V, also negative voltages of these levels, and a 0 will be a representation of zero volts while a 1 will be one of those specified voltages. When you look at the actual voltage waveforms, it isn't really digital but analogue, with a transient wave as the voltage changes from 0 to 1 and vice versa. It's not really a solid square step, but a slope that passes a pickup or dropoff before reaching the nominal voltage level. So a digital computer is basically the same as how they're describing an analogue computer.

I'm sure there is something different and novel about this study, but the article doesn't seem to have a clue what that is.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

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