Analog is the future of PC's and AI ??

[Eban]

Might be long to watch but very interesting!

[duskw4lker]

so if I understood it right, the key is the weight assigned through 'training' the 'analog neurons' by substracting errors where each 'analog neuron' that outweighs or gets outweighed by other layers of neurons value in a particular case of defining which criteria/output/answer is delivered/applied through a matrix calculation that ultimately represents a quorum that reached an agreement??... what?? I'm not trying to be a smartass, it was really complex to try to comprehend all that info, and I'm glad that I don't have to solve those kind of problems 😅

 

however it may be, it's great to see how technology goes back to the basics (repurposing flash cells currently used for digital storage to analog calculations), and greatly improve those concepts in the pursuit of tackling a particular problem. Different tools for different problems, awesome 😄

[Ishayin]

Thanks for posting – that is interesting indeed and a lot of different aspects to consider. I feel like the whole "exact vs inexact" dichotomy here is a bit well, inexact. The question should surely rather be "how exact". From a physics perspective, I assume the inexactness they are speaking to is associated with the noise levels inherent in the electronic signals and read-outs. So presumably they could do things like reduce the temperature to reduce the Johnson/thermal noise, or increase currents/voltages, or add duplicated parallel processing with balanced connections. Though all of these options would increase power requirements. Anyway, I figure there must be some kind of trade-off that can be had with different designs with different compromises suited to different applications...

 

Anyone here a computer scientist who could speak to what the fundamental application limitations might be? From the very simplified story presented there you get the idea that the range of possible applications should be much broader than just AI, but maybe that is misleading. Surely the output of GPUs for example does not need to be exact, so can we utilise an analog chip for at least the final rendering part of the computational chain? If it's not possible to develop general purpose analog chips, then they won't replace CPUs, but perhaps more promising as additional complementary chips that can be assigned particular tasks?

 

Anyway, always nice to see the development of much more efficient approaches, and people generally thinking outside the box. ☺️

[aldarxt]

Very Interesting even groundbreaking kinda like when man added the wheel to the box, he no longer needed to carry the box, he got in and went