The difference between the deterministic substrate in an ASIC and non-deterministic substrate in a brain means we should resist simple comparisons even with any

The difference between the deterministic substrate in an ASIC and non-deterministic substrate in a brain means we should resist simple comparisons even with any sort of computer hardware, specialized or not. Synapses sit, from an electronics perspective, in a weird in-between space between linear analog computation and digital computation. There are lab prototype computational devices that might make good comparisons but it's just too different from, say, the sort of specialized decoders you'd find on your phone SoC for that to be a good analogy.