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Comment on Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence

Seems interesting but it has the stink of “buzzword marketing” all over it. The example given in the article about using it for wake words is just using a microphone connected to the device. Microphones and speakers are both analog devices that all digital phones have already. Also the fact that it’s an IC that’s programmable leads me to believe it’s not analog at all, or else how can it be programmed?

I also thought it was funny to talk about environmental damage from all these digital sensors and then suggesting we could use thermometers filled with mercury. Mercury is a heavy metal and extremely toxic to most lifeforms, which is why we don’t use it in thermometers anymore.

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elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

leads me to believe it’s not analog at all, or else how can it be programmed?

Not to take away from your main point, but analog things can be programmed - those old school power socket timers, or that toy car that follows a line drawn on the floor. Maybe those programmable units are tiny baggage analytical machines? But yeah, in the end, I side with you.

I also thought it was funny to talk about environmental damage from all these digital sensors and then using thermometers filled with mercury as an example of an analog sensor.

What’s even funnier is that he called a thermometer “a computer.” Eh no. You can’t make thermometers compute anything.

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ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lots of buzzwords indeed, author apparently doesn’t even know what a smart sensor is, as they described a regular sensor in their first paragraph.

That said, you can absolutely program analog ICs, such as by using a Field Programmable Gate Array instead of just your regular Gate Array (your usual, ‘stupid’ IC). Though, while a random IC might cost you less than half a dollar, a FPGA will cost you around 100$ for a simple chip.

On the other hand, skipping any GPU or CPU and their limitations by clock speed should speed up the AI considerably, though parallel programming (not concurrent programming) is much harder and comes with almost no safety when compared to serial programming.

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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What do you mean by “almost no safety”?
  
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  - ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A CPU is a very complex gate array which handles bothersome tasks such as synchronization (run conditions) and memory access, and presents you with a very limited set of instructions. All serial programming builds upon this very limited set of instructions, and the instructions have been thoroughly tested over the past 6 decades.
    
    Not to say that CPU architecture or microcode is fail-safe, but the chance of your computer blue-screening because of a failure of your CPU is rather small.
    
    Now, parallel programming (the low level variant, not the hijacked definition) is the art of “wiring” those gate arrays manually. A CPU is actually made using parallel programming, so all the safeties it presents for serial programming will not be present in parallel programming, as parallel programming does not use a CPU.
    
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    elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You lost me at parallel programming not using a CPU.
    
    Perhaps you mean that it uses the lower levels of the CPU.
    
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