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A comment on Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS. Parent comment

Re:Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS by breck on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:15PM (#21326908)
> Analog computers making a comeback ? you never know.

For dataflow paradigms like deep neural nets it makes sense. If it's significantly faster and significantly more power efficient, and the intermediate states are largely arbitrary weights anyway, what's the point of digital precision.

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Re:Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS by regularfry on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:19PM (#21326946)
It's not the precision, it's avoiding O(n^2) physical connections per layer.
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Re:Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS by breck on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:57PM (#21327306)
That's my point. Swapping digital for analog gives up the ability to know the precise bits of a register but in return you gain a lot in efficiency.
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Re:Bipolar-Zener Combo Takes On CMOS by regularfry on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @02:12AM (#21331595)
That's not what I'm getting at. It's not the nodes you need to worry about, it's the edges. If you've got two fully connected 100-neuron layers in a physical circuit, that's 10,000 wires you need to route, and they all want to cross each other. That's why nobody builds physical neural networks.
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