Technology

I mean it‘s like the 10th time I‘m reading about THE breakthrough in Chinese chip production on Lemmy so lets just say I‘m not holding my breath LoL.

But it only does 16x16 matrix inversion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

Here's the paper published in Nature.

However, it's worth noting that Nature has had to retract studies before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)#Retractions

From 2000 to 2001, a series of five fraudulent papers by Jan Hendrik Schön was published in Nature. The papers, about semiconductors, were revealed to contain falsified data and other scientific fraud. In 2003, Nature retracted the papers. The Schön scandal was not limited to Nature; other prominent journals, such as Science and Physical Review, also retracted papers by Schön.

Not saying that we shouldn't trust anything published in scientific journals, but yes, we should wait until more studies that replicate these results exist before jumping to conclusions.

Just push ever so slightly more when you hear the crunching sounds.

1000x yes!

“1000x faster?” Learn to lie better

Analogue computers are indeed capable of doing a task 1000x faster than a regular computer. The difference is they do only that task, in a very specific way, and with one specific type of output. You can 3D print at home an "analogue computer" that can solve calculus equations, it can technically be faster than a CPU, but that's the only thing it can do, it's complex, and the output is a drawing on paper.

If you come up with a repeatable and precise set of mechanical movements that are analogous to the problem you want to solve, you can indeed come up with headlines like that.

Because until it hits market, it’s almost meaningless. These journalists do the same shit with drugs in trials or early research.

Here's a Veritasium video from 3 years ago about an American company making analog chips, explaining why they are so much more efficient in certain tasks. https://youtu.be/GVsUOuSjvcg

It is not an incremental improvement because it's a radically different approach. This is not like making a new CPU architecture or adding more IPC, it's doing computation in a whole different way, that is closer to a physical model using springs/gravity/gears/whatever to model something like the Antikythera mechanism or those water-based financial models than any digital computer.

Also, uncritically dismissing anything coming from China as a scam is not being resistant to Chinese propaganda, it's just falling for the US'.

Same here. I wait to see real life calculations done by such circuits. They won't be able to e.g. do a simple float addition without losing/mangling a bunch of digits.

But maybe the analog precision is sufficient for AI, which is an imprecise matter from the start.

You might benefit from watching Hinton's lecture; much of it details technical reasons why digital is much much better than analog for intelligent systems

BTW that is the opposite of what he set out to prove He says the facts forced him to change his mind

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw

That's a good point. The model weights could be voltage levels instead of digital representations. Lots of audio tech uses analog for better fidelity.I also read that there's a startup using particle beams for lithography. Exciting times.

To be clear though, the two defined states are separated by a voltage gap, so either it is on or off regardless of how on or how off. For example, if the off is 0V and the on is 5V then 4V is neither of those but will be either considered as on. So if it is above thecriticam threshold it is on and therefore represents a 1, otherwise it is a 0.

An analogue computer would be able to use all of the variable voltage range. This means that instead of having a whole bunch of gates working together to represent a number the voltage could be higher or lower. Something that takes 64 bits could be a single voltage. That would mean more processing in the same space and much less actual computation required.

@carrylex @kalkulat If you zoom in, you will see that it is in fact a real photo. It's just someone who thought putting a CPU upside down was a good idea.