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Analog computing may be coming back

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Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#41

Analog computing sucks. It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation in your devices that's basically ubiquitous with modern chip-making processes. Digital electronics actively reject noise at every step in a computation, albeit at the cost of wasting energy in the process. With analog, a more complex computation becomes exponentially harder.

There are forms of analogue computing beyond solving DEs with circuit theory. One of the more esoteric examples I'd heard of was using DNA microarrays for massively parallel SAT solvers: combinatorically generate a very large number of different, long single-strands of DNA using clever chemistry, flow over short pieces of DNA that encode your problem that are flourescently labelled, and then "simply" read off the result. Being able to use the fact that Avogadro's number is absolutely massive is a big speed-up for some particularly nasty NP-hard problems where you want to brute force it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35003155

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#42

I think that the author is wrong. Analog computer's weak point is the power supply, such that many companies making them ended up having to manufacture their own to very high standards, such as big capacitors with 0.1% tolerance. Reason is that you are using the analog voltage and thus poor power regulation leads to inaccurate results. With newer analog computer setups more is integrated into the chip itself, making…

On the other hand, making large passives on silicon is extremely challenging to do accurately, and relatively expensive in terms of area. Most power regulators rely on external caps for this reason.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#43

Analog computing sucks. It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation in your devices that's basically ubiquitous with modern chip-making processes. Digital electronics actively reject noise at every step in a computation, albeit at the cost of wasting energy in the process. With analog, a more complex computation becomes exponentially harder.

Sounds a lot like "quantum computing".

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#44

Analog will likely come back but for other reasons: Neural networks don't require precise calculations and Hintons forward forward networks put into hardware would be several orders of magnitudes more efficient, even without photons. "AI inferencing is heavily dependent on multiply/accumulate operations, which are highly efficient in analog." If you know of any startup working on this let me know because I'd love to…

Neural nets, AFAIAA, usually rely on the digital simulation of analog processes. NN weights, inputs and outputs are all continuous values. I suspect an integrated all-analog NN chip will be along soon, and might run more efficiently and faster than the digital simulation.

I don't see why it shouldn't use photonics.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#46
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't any optical computer have to still funnel signal through binary logic gates at some point? In what sense is that any more analog than (digital recordings on analog) magnetic tape decoded by a modem? The ultimate computation is still 1/0

Get a ruler. Draw a line 10 cm long, AB. Now grab end B and draw another another line, BC, with a certain angle $/alpha$ wrt to the first. Now measure the distance AC. Congratulations! You have just built an analog computer to use the Law of Cosines to solve for line segment AC. Non-dimensionalize your result and its a general LofC solver. A problem that (I suspect) would take the majority of modern day Eng undergrad…

The issues arise when converting the analog outputs of those physical experiments back to the digital domain for processing. High speed and resolution analog to digital converters are not cheap, and often require different process node technologies for implementation. The cost savings from the elimination of computing the models digitally have to be weighed against the costs arising from the converters' introduction.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't any optical computer have to still funnel signal through binary logic gates at some point? In what sense is that any more analog than (digital recordings on analog) magnetic tape decoded by a modem? The ultimate computation is still 1/0

Get a ruler. Draw a line 10 cm long, AB. Now grab end B and draw another another line, BC, with a certain angle $/alpha$ wrt to the first. Now measure the distance AC. Congratulations! You have just built an analog computer to use the Law of Cosines to solve for line segment AC. Non-dimensionalize your result and its a general LofC solver. A problem that (I suspect) would take the majority of modern day Eng undergrad…

>> Now build a robot that measures AC for you and you have an API for your analog computer.

This line made me laugh out loud, but what an amazing explanation and set of examples. Thank you.

The original ECU in my 1980 Datsun ... is digital, right? I just never thought of the insane analog vacuum pot system that controls the cold start valve and the air conditioning selector and the cruise control to also be a "computer" but I guess it does compute things, in its humble way ;)

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#48
post #3

One of the things that I fully not expect to be successful is optical computing. There are just a lot of academic groups that are doing optics and they like to invent new reasons why whatever they are up to is relevant. For physics reasons the integration density of optical compute elements is abysmal and will remain so forever . Other technologies like spintronics at least have the chance to work sometime in the fut…

> For physics reasons the integration density of optical compute elements is abysmal and will remain so forever. Could you give some details? Claims about "forever" often don't hold up. I guess you're referring to things like component size in relation to the wavelength of light used? One could use smaller wavelengths. Integrated photonics is certainly being done and also commercially relevant (in telecommunications)…

Visible light and near ultra-violet light has a wavelength ~400-800 nm, current gen transistors have a pitch of ~40 nm. This gets worse because scaling is actually either quadratic (2d) or cubic (future 3d integration). So we are talking about 100x to 1000x worse spatial scaling disadvantage at the moment. The only redeeming quality of light is wavelength multiplexing, but that is only useful for a subset of applications, like optical communication and (maybe) convolutions (see below).

Moreover even in a hypothetical scenario where we somehow were able to find materials applicable to smaller wavelength, the deBroglie wavelength of an electron is ~1000x smaller, than that of a Photon at the same energy. So in terms of integration density electrons will always have a 10^6 - 10^9 (2d - 3d) theoretical advantage over photons, which means that investment in electron based computation will have a much more likely eventual payoff.

Take for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03070-1, they have a bunch of projections for what they hope to achieve over time. The most fantastical figure they give is 50 Peta MAC / s, but this doesn't take into account the PCM programming time.

If you take a look at the supplementary material https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... it becomes clear that they currently have a much lower TOPS/Watt figure than current generation ML ASIC like the TPU and this neglects all the expensive experimental optical equipment they would need to miniaturise. So even in their most favourable comparison they are 5x worse. Most of these papers unfortunately are full of hype and claims like that.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#49
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analog computers are like LP records: only good for nostalgia.

Depth of sound, long term storage, ease of navigation, there are lots of reasons people prefer vinyl that aren't based in nostalgia.

No DRM and the fact that you actually own it is a big plus.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#50
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't any optical computer have to still funnel signal through binary logic gates at some point? In what sense is that any more analog than (digital recordings on analog) magnetic tape decoded by a modem? The ultimate computation is still 1/0

Get a ruler. Draw a line 10 cm long, AB. Now grab end B and draw another another line, BC, with a certain angle $/alpha$ wrt to the first. Now measure the distance AC. Congratulations! You have just built an analog computer to use the Law of Cosines to solve for line segment AC. Non-dimensionalize your result and its a general LofC solver. A problem that (I suspect) would take the majority of modern day Eng undergrad…

40s navy videos showed many electromechanical computers using simple geometric blocs encoding sin x as a groove.

Coupled together the embodied a mid sized equation (of the other way around), live and reactive as we'd say today.

Kinda blew my mind.

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