Analogue Processing: Speed & Efficiency Benefits?

[Lee]

Would a analogue processor offer significant speed ups on binary processors, on the scales of decimal bits and then if we had a bit with 100 states. I know that for the transfer of information would receive significant improvements but would this also be true for processing information?

 

[interested_learner]

The devil is in the details. How do you represent the 100 states? If it is by having 100 different voltage levels then you would need to have a larger voltage swing in order to differentiate between the values. This means more time to charge the caps and more time to decode what value you actually have... etc.

Not so easy when one looks at the details.

 

[light_bulb]

sounds like a adc to fpga(or other type of gate array) to dac or in other words an asic dsp, they already are analog in a way.

 

[Lee]

Hehehe, my idea is not using voltages. I'm not that silly. I was asking on a purely theoretical basis of having 2 machines that are the same except one works on a binary bit and the other with a decimal bit. Would we have a significant speed up?

 

[Crosson]

Would we have a significant speed up?

It is impossible to answer this question without discussing the implementation,but in any case I can imagine the answer is no.