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Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something, but won't this chip need a ton of ADCs to process these computations?

DACs on one end and ADCs on the other, yeah. I guess though, it may be possible to hook analog inputs directly to it in some way, such as a camera or mic.

But if it's one-bit values, they're simple and fast -- ADC is just a threshold, and DAC is a step function.

This guy studied signal processing.

Shhhh. When it comes to analog computing, discussing reality is not appreciated.

1. Single bit ADC/DACs are trivial.

2. CDAC + switched capacitor multiplier + SAR ADC can be competitive with digital multiplier.

1. Yes, and the advantage of analog is significantly reduced as well, as a binary multiply and add then reduce to single gate operations.

2. Switched capacitor multipliers (actually almost anything analog) have difficulty scaling with feature shrinks, and that's before considering noise. E.g. see all the difficulties Xilinx went through to get 16nm FinFET ADCs efficiently working.

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