You've got me intrigued -- what are examples of mechanical devices being faster than digital ones? Assuming you're talking man-made.
I'm trying to imagine and am totally stumped.
I'm trying to imagine and am totally stumped.
An opamp performs multiplication faster than a digital computer (speed of light vs a few cycles). It's not super useful on its own, but it does fit the criteria.
In Veritasium's video 2/2 on analog computers [0] they show some startup products near the end.
Analog multiplier ICs are available.[1] They're not common, and they cost $10-$20 each. Error is about 2% worst case for that one. There are several clever tricks used to multiply. See "Gilbert Cell" and "quarter square multiplier".
[1] https://www.digikey.com/en/htmldatasheets/production/1031484...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_(mechanical_devic...
They are not very different from a computation inside an injection controller of an ICE, with its results consumed within microseconds, as motions of injection valves. They key difference is the intermediate use of an electronic computer, an MCU, instead of a purely mechanical and pretty inflexible device, the camshaft.
Certainly we could replace a swashplate with some electric or hydraulic actuators driven by an MCU if we needed to compute something more complex than what a swashplate currently computes, much as we did with the camshaft. This is not very probable though, because a new system should also work unpowered to allow auto-rotation, to say nothing of higher reliability requirements than a system for a car.
In the north-pointing chariot or the Antikythera mechanism, the differential performed a computational function, with its action of transmitting power quite peripheral to that; in your car's rear end, it performs a power-transmission function, with its action of computation quite peripheral to that.
The same situation holds with transistors. You can use a 2N7000 to toggle a light or control a relay or a motor, or you can use it for (digital or analog) computation.
If you're using it in an NMOS NOT gate or the input stage of an op-amp, you're using it for computation, and so you wish it were smaller; it would work better if it were smaller because then it wouldn't need so much energy to turn it on or off. (For analog computation, you only wish it were smaller up to a point, because at extremely small sizes that makes it more sensitive to noise, but you wish it were really a lot smaller than a 2N7000.) A 2N5457 is generally better for an amplifier input stage, and the no-longer-available discrete signal MOSFETs are probably better for NMOS NOT gates. The N-MOSFETs integrated into a chip are enormously better at computation than a 2N7000.
By the same token, though, a 2N5457 or signal MOSFET is much worse than a 2N7000 at power transmission. If you're using it to PWM a motor, you wish it were larger; it would work better if it were larger because then it would be at less risk of overheating, be more efficient at a given current level, and be able to control a bigger motor. An IRF630 is a better power MOSFET than a 2N7000; an IRF540N is better still. But they're enormously worse at computation than a 2N7000.
Helicopter swashplates and differentials are very much on the power-transmission end of the spectrum, not the computation end, even though they cannot avoid doing computation as part of their job.
You might be able to build a fluid device to test a property faster than you can simulate the fluid dynamics in full detail. Perhaps not on the first iteration, but iterating small changes to get a desired result could certainly be faster than simulating it, for simple systems.
https://www.techspot.com/trivia/97-1930s-which-countries-bui...
I like the COMPAQ branding added to it!
For mechanical naval fire control computers the cutoff frequency is on the order of 100 Hz and the error is on the order of 1%. You won't learn anything interesting by sampling them every microsecond that you wouldn't learn by sampling them every millisecond.
One example, if I need something that when two switches are triggered will turn on a light bulb (basically an AND gate) it's obviously faster doing that with an analog (mechanical) device, that is the two switches wired in series, than acquiring the signal with a microcontroller and outputting a signal to turn on the light bulb.
Thinking about the industrial world, there are cases where you have constraints about speed and real time that make sense to do signal processing with analog components rather than digital ones. And that was always the case before computers where invented, by the way (missile guidance systems were purely analog, as one example, you can do a lot of stuff!)