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I have an analog circuits and a bit of an analog computing background and I will tell you this: analog computers have been around for awhile in commercial appli
by mwbajor 3y ago
I have an analog circuits and a bit of an analog computing background and I will tell you this: analog computers have been around for awhile in commercial applications, still to this day theyre used to great success in some niche applications. They're limited by their flexibility as they are not really reprogrammable. Analog circuits need to be designed for each specific application. There are papers and prototypes built to create "reconfigurable" analog versions of FPGAs but they are limited by physical scalability issues, noise, routing, etc.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoI agree with you completely on this, and I also have a bit of an analog circuits background. These chips are unfortunately probably better thought of as purpose-built accelerators for specific neural networks trained almost a decade ago than as the next paradigm of computing.
- mwbajor 3y agoWhat got me into analog computing was eliminating the step (data conversion) between sensing the signal and doing something with it. But when you add in the inflexibility of analog circuits, the mostly analog solution is almost always the bad one.