Look, It's one of those articles again. The bi-monthly "China invents earth-shattering technology breakthrough that we never hear about again."
"1000x faster?" Learn to lie better. Real technological improvements are almost always incremental, like "10-20% faster, bigger, stronger." Not 1000 freaking times faster. You lie like a child. Or like Trump.
“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.
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'.
Yep! It’s a modal difference. Analogous to dismissing SSDs as a replacement for HDDs. HDDs get incrementally better as they improve their density capabilities. SSDs, meanwhile, came along and provided a “1000x” gain in speed. Let me tell folks here: that was MAGICAL. The future had arrived, at tremendous initial cost mind you, but it’s now the mainstream standard.
(Funny thing about HDDs — they’re serving a new niche in modern times. Ultra high densities have unlocked tremendously cheap bulk storage. Need to store an exabyte somewhere? Or need to read some data but don’t mind waiting a couple minutes/hours? SMR drives got ya covered. That’s the backbone of the cloud in 2025 with data storage exploding year over year.)
It can be 1000x faster because it analog. Analog things take very very little time to compute stuff. We don't generally use them because they are very hard to get the same result twice and updating is also hard
The fun thing is, for LLM you don't need perfectly repeatable result. It won't speed up training but running the chips could be significantly cheaper with that kind of tech. Veritasium had a video about it a couple of years back, before the ai craze.
Because until it hits market, it’s almost meaningless. These journalists do the same shit with drugs in trials or early research.
I agree that before it's a company selling a product it's just dreams.
However this is serious research. Skip the journo and open the nature.com link to the scientific article.
For the ones not familiar with nature, it's a highly regarded scientific magazine. Articles are written by researchers not journalists.
It uses 1% of the energy but is still 1000x faster than our current fastest cards? Yea, I'm calling bullshit. It's either a one off, bullshit, or the next industrial revolution.
EDIT: Also, why do articles insist on using ##x less? You can just say it uses 1% of the energy. It's so much easier to understand.
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.
Yeah it’s like reading about North American battery science. Like yeah ok cool, see you in 30 years when you’re maybe production ready
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.
Okay, I'm starting to think this article doesn't really know what it's talking about...
For most of modern computing history, however, analog technology has been written off as an impractical alternative to digital processors. This is because analog systems rely on continuous physical signals to process information — for example, a voltage or electric current. These are much more difficult to control precisely than the two stable states (1 and 0) that digital computers have to work with.
1 and 0 are in fact representative of voltages in digital computers. Typically, on a standard IBM PC, you have 3.3V, 5V and 12V, also negative voltages of these levels, and a 0 will be a representation of zero volts while a 1 will be one of those specified voltages. When you look at the actual voltage waveforms, it isn't really digital but analogue, with a transient wave as the voltage changes from 0 to 1 and vice versa. It's not really a solid square step, but a slope that passes a pickup or dropoff before reaching the nominal voltage level. So a digital computer is basically the same as how they're describing an analogue computer.
I'm sure there is something different and novel about this study, but the article doesn't seem to have a clue what that is.
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.
This is an analog pc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer
It does seem to be talking about this, analog doesn't from my understanding use 1 or 0 as a representation. It is true that the cpu uses voltage as you stated, but what differentiates it from analog is that in analog the volatge isn't represented as 0 or 1 and is used as is in calculations.
They are not programmed, they are physically made to preform the calculation from my understanding, like for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The thing which makes digital chips so much better than analog chips is something both you and the article are missing: noise. A digital chip is very robust against noise, as long as the noise in one step isn't too big so it causes a bitflip immediately the stable configuration will pull the voltage level back and no information is lost. Not so with analog logic, since the information is continuous every step which introduces noice (which is basically every step) will cause loss of information. Go a few levels of logic deep and all you've got left is noise.
Go a few levels of logic deep and all you’ve got left is noise.
Which you often don't need. Mechanical computers for aircraft operation, or hydraulic computers for modeling something nuclear, things like that.
But there's nothing "century-old" about all this. They might have non-deterministic steps for some calculation where determinism is not needed (like if you need to ray-trace a sphere, you'll do fine with a bit different dithering each time) and without it better performance is achievable.
The idea seems to make sense, just - it will never be revolutionary.
Digital systems are built on analog systems, as you observed. A continuous voltage range is reduced to two possible states: high voltage (the upper part of that range) and low voltage (the lower part of that range). Then, we design algorithms that manipulate these high/low voltages that only consider the two possibilities of either being high or low. Since we dont consider what the actual voltages are, just if they are high or low, we are doing digital computing, we are not taking full advantage of the analog potential of the physical objects we are using underneath the sheets.
For the love of Christ this thumbnail is triggering, lol
Just push ever so slightly more when you hear the crunching sounds.
1000x!
Is this like medical articles about major cancer discoveries?
1000x yes!
yes, except the bullshit cancer discoveries are always in Israel, and the bullshit chip designs are in china.
This was bound to happen. Neural networks are inherently analog processes, simulating them digitally is massively expensive in terms of hardware and power.
Digital domain is good for exact computation, analog is better for approximate computation, as required by neural networks.
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
This seems like promising technology, but the figures they are providing are almost certainly fiction.
This has all the hallmarks of a team of researchers looking to score an R&D budget.
sounds like bullshit.
read the paper
The paper doesn't even claim they achieved it. They only say it could potentially reach it
The problem is with the clickbait headline (on livescience.com), not the paper itself.
> See article preview image
> AI crap CPU
> Leaves immediately
Which is worse - AI slop, or people decrying everything they see as AI slop, even when it isn't?
Ahh yeah and we should 1. Believe this exists 2. Believe that china doesnt think technology of this caliber isnt a matter of national security
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
