Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence

Comments

• FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Relating this to carbon emissions is absurd. Your phone’s maximum power consumption is about 25W, of which sensors are a tiny, minuscule fraction. Running your phone at 25W for an entire year would allow you to drive a typical petrol car doing 40mpg for 250 miles on the same energy budget.

  Reducing sensor power usage is good, but not for this reason.

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  • frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There is a connection, but I don’t think it’s a satisfying one.

    There’s some thought that the weights behind neural networks would take less power consumption if they were on analog chips. So yeah, it’s for LLMs to get bigger. Reducing CO2 emissions by not doing LLM slop is apparently off the table.

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    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Reducing CO2 emissions by not doing LLM slop is apparently off the table.

      Not to be argumentative, but has this ever been something the consumer market has done with an emerging “core” technology? I don’t see how this was ever realistically on the table.

      AI slop is an unfortunate fact of life at this point. If it’s inevitable, we may as well make it as not terrible as possible.

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    • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This is how I understood it too.

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  • macaw_dean_settle@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    *gasoline or diesel. You cannot use petroleum as it needs to be refined.

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    • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrol

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    • gnu@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Petrol and gasoline are the same thing, it’s just different terminology.

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• randomblock1@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Isn’t there already a special low-power part of phone chips designed to listen for wake words?

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  — with a little help from AI.

  I call nullshit.

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  • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    nullshit.

    Image

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• pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  As cool as it sound at a glance, I fail to see the case they’re trying to build.

  And of course, they have to sprinkle a little AI on it.

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• floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No, it isn’t. There’s just a passing interest in retro technology

  It’ll pass

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  • sploosh@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    New, programmable analog chips that perform basic sound processing aren’t retro. The article is worth reading.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Or, if you can’t read, Veritasium did a video: youtu.be/GVsUOuSjvcg

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  • EnsignWashout@startrek.website ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    @retrolemmy username…hm…

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  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This has nothing to do with retro technology. This is about thinking “is using binary really the most efficient way to run every computation we need to do?”, which is really relevant today.

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    • floo@retrolemmy.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Is it? Binary is not a “analog” vs “digital” thing. “Binary” existed in analog computing for a couple of centuries at least before the concept of “digital“ even existed.

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• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I would like more something like a GPU to become normal, except it’d be an analog unit for kinds of computation vastly more efficient this way, where you don’t need determinism. Some trigonometry and signal processing, perhaps even some of 3d graphics.

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