Comment on Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence
ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months agoLots 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.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What do you mean by “almost no safety”?
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.
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.
ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
I think you are misunderstanding me. Are you perhaps thinking about multithreading or multi core? Because some people have also started calling that “parallel”, even if it is nothing like low-level parallel.
A CPU does not build upon a CPU, a CPU builds upon a transistors which are collected into gates, and which can be assembled into the correct order using parallel programming.