Vinyl records also don’t have 0’s and zeroes, it does not make them better than Blu-ray. MLC NAND have more than just 1’s and 0’s, they have 0..7 or even 0..15.
Does anyone really want to process analog data?
But.. you do all the time. pretty much all the time these binary states are calculated from curves, or approximations. The state isn't 1 or 0, its the set of states which make 1 or 0 depending, under error correcting codes, over-sampling, things like manchester encoding.
We're fundamentally imposing binary on a non-binary state, by making deterministic judgement calls about which side of a divide things fall on, but to do that we have to look at analogue qualities.
I like to imagine people who work in VLSI smile at this statement, but at some level its analogue everywhere. It's higher-states which get to act like its binary, but they map to an analogue signal substrate.
2. It appears to not be analog.
>An energy barrier is created at the points where the bridges meet the device contacts, and the height of this barrier can be controlled which changes the electrical resistance of the overall material. That in turn is what encodes the data.
That seems to indicate they can have a base-n encoding where n is what they can practically achieve with the barrier/bridge layering scheme.
Both the audio and video are FM encoded.
(Yea, 30 minutes per side is long for an LP, more like 20-22 minutes is typical, but hey, it's analog. To a point you could increase playing time by deceasing volume.
The most extreme case of this I'm aware of is "90 minutes with Aurthur Felder and the Boston Pops", which what it says it is... the first side alone is a hair over 47 minutes).
We would already have something similar with SSD and many more bits/levels per site if voltages were precise and stable over time and number of overwrites.
An interesting use would be for storing 1-dimensional data. In effect the errors would be minor and not randomized/scattered as it would be for digital encodings.
It was a failure of marketing and building. Today's computers use a team of DRAM (like DDR5) and Flash. (GPU-ram like HBM or GDDR6 are still DRAM fundamentally).
The data rate from a noisy channel or storage can be derived from Shannon-hartley theorem.
This is why the old analogue phones could only do 56k for example.
Leased point-to-point DS0 circuits could do a full 64KBps if the whole circuit was 8-bit clean.
And somehow, on analogue circuit switch phone call mode, still sounded better with less artifacts than most mobile phone calls!
"Across the world, we make 13.5 billion phone calls every day, using mobile phones. The average person makes or receives around eight phone calls every day, meaning that the US deals with around 2.4 billion phone calls across the 300 million cell phone users" that's from 2023 source.
Here's a 2019 one about US:
On average, people make and receive a total of 178 calls per month Of those 178 total calls, 93 are calls received and 85 are calls made
Not just older people either:
"80% of Millennials and 84% of Gen Z-ers use their phones during 2020 for phone calls".
I mean... maybe we should?
All radio waves, such as 802.11, are fundamentally analog data. And then they are converted back into digital with incredible QAM-encoding levels. If you think QLC 4-bits per Flash-cell is big, wait till you see 256-QAM (aka: 8-bits per 802.11 timeslice), or more.
I believe I saw some spec for some fiber-optic cable that is 32768-QAM (aka: 15-bits per timeslice).
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Then again, Flash (and other memory) are composed of individual cells. True-analog signals like radio-waves are truly analog, so maybe its not quite the same.
But maybe we should think of things like tape or hard-drives as an analog signal. Or maybe not, who knows? I'm not actually a storage specialist so I don't really know. (Nor am I really in communications, lol).
Well-engineered systems have "noise immunity" meaning that the thresholds are well above the noise floor, making the likelihood of an error negligible.
If you hang an oscilloscope probe on a "digital" signal, such as the data lines on a memory chip, it might look like a frightening mess, but so long as the rules are obeyed, data transfer occurs faithfully.
In a true analog medium, there's no way that the receiver can make out precisely what was sent, and two receivers will get different information.
Well-engineered systems also expect noise and compensate with error detection/correction.
Also, the exact same thing is true of every other particle: just as photons are quantizations of the electro-magnetic waves, electrons are quantizations of waves in the electron field, quarks are quantized waves in the quark field etc. Atoms and molecules are also waves; in fact, there have been experiments showing the wave-like nature of molecules with something like 5000 atoms.
Photon is radio-wave (EM-wave). Typical photon is produced and consumed by a electron, so properties of photon produced by an electron are limited by the electron, also, our abilty to detect photonare limited by the electron. However, EM-waves in general are not limited by electron.
On smaller scale, electron interacts with other charged particles and with EM-field (the medium) via EM-waves. I'm pretty sure that electron is not staying stil, it's vibrating because of thermal noise. Vibration of charged particle produces EM-waves. Those EM-waves are not photons.
Yes, they are. In the Standard Model, the photon is the "carrier" particle of the EM field. Any EM interaction between any two charged particles is ultimately the exchange of one or more photons between those two charged particles. When a particle emits an EM wave, in any way, it emits one or more photons. It's impossible to emit 1/2 a photon or 1.3 photons - the EM field / EM waves come in quantities of whole photons.
In the same way, when two quarks interact via the strong interaction, they are emitting and absorbing gluons, the carrier particle of the strong force.
The only fundamental interaction not currently proven to be quantized is gravity. We do know gravity waves exist, but we have not been able to measure them to the required fidelity to verify whether they are also quantized, and thus to know whether they are also equivalent to an exchange of particles (we call these hypothetical particles gravitons, and many do believe that gravitational interactions also occur by the exchange of a whole number of gravitons between bodies with "gravitational charge", i.e. mass).
If you like hydrodynamic quantum analogs (walking droplets), then you may see that droplet may escape it pilot wave sometimes. In such cases, pilot wave continue to travel in same direction for some time. IMHO, it's similar to how photons are formed: electron creates pilot wave, then escapes it, similar to Cherenkov radiation.
Anyway, photons have special configuration, so they behaves differently than regular waves.
Gravitational waves, AFAIK, are not topologically stable at all.
Also the article is just describing memristor memory isn't it? Intel's been shipping Optane memristor based memory (which they deny, but others are skeptical of the denial) for years, so clearly I'm missing something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/29/intel_optane_memory_d...
I think the term you're looking for is trit (ternary/trinary digit).
If they can get it to encode binary data more densely than existing systems, with acceptable speed/reliability/cost? Yes, of course they would.
So you can store more information in each memory location resulting in higher density.
Analog isn't really the issue here as there would be some kind of multiplexing/demultiplexing encoding or device to interface with it. It would still be discrete and have defined levels. as the technology advances you may be able to define more levels in the same bandwidth space thus creating "more" storage by greater efficiency of the spectrum.
And, does anyone want more than 0 and 1? If it's faster and has largest capacities, with equally feasible manufacturing, then yes.
I imagine at some point in the abstractions it'll get a compat layer. Also, I could be wrong about MLC NAND but I thought it still stored 0/1 and just had more bits stored per cell through stacking.
So each cell stores either three pieces of binary or one piece of octal. It's the same thing.
Building a computer where each wire can encode multiple bits of data at the exact same time fundamentally changes the way operations are done. The entire thing would need to be built in a different way, with different consequences.
It might be a bad idea, or impossible, but it would be different.