4 ms·
I really want to believe, but if I had a penny for every time that analog, optical, ternary, clockless, or other radically non-standard computing paradigms were
by non_aligned 1y ago
I really want to believe, but if I had a penny for every time that analog, optical, ternary, clockless, or other radically non-standard computing paradigms were supposed to revolutionize the industry... I'd have a nice pile of pennies.
Electronic signaling is just so marvelously easy to scale that the right path was clear pretty much from day one. We don't have that path for other operating principles right now. As for synchronous operation, binary signaling, and so forth, they're once again just scaling tools that let us crank out designs with billions of transistors without hand-crafting every piece or making the abstractions more leaky than they already are.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoA difference now is that moore’s law per power density has been dead a few years and physics says it can’t get much better. The other difference is that computers are now powerful enough to do the 10^20 calculations required to design efficient optical metamaterials for optical inference.
- eru 1y ago> [...] and physics says it can’t get much better. What part of physics do you have in mind?
- pringk02 1y agoProbably the lower bound on transistor size https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
- mensetmanusman 1y agokT generated per electron based gate activation.
- VMG 1y agonaive question: isn't fiber optic cables for communication a counter-example to your thesis?
- ww520 1y agoFiber optic is a communication medium, not a computation device.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoProgress doesn't happen out of thin air. Someone has to go in and do the work, and find out the limits or feasibility of such and such tech. More interest in this is good in the long run, even if the first few iterations don't prove revolutionary.
- econ 1y agoYou can have as many iterations as it takes, you need only one to work. Thousands or millions is fine. If you keep track of what was tried and how hard everything is a gain.
- imtringued 1y agoYour perspective only makes sense in the context of machine learning and general purpose computation. I'm not really seeing any ASICs that are built for running optimizers. Meanwhile the "AOC" is really good at solving unconstrained/equality-constrained quadratic programs.
- ww520 1y agoYou are right. > The current hardware includes 16 microLEDs and 16 photodetectors, supporting a 16-variable state vector…