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Comment by phdelightful | Hacker News Reader

My understanding (perhaps outdated) is that manufacturing variability is a key challenge for analog computing. Digital designs are also fundamentally analogue under the hood, but if you only need to resolve a 0 or 1 you are much more tolerant of any source of noise. I wouldn't mind hearing even a little bit more from Mythic about how they make this work in practice.

A 2026 EE Times article [1] refers to "compensation" and "calibration" techniques.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/mythic-rises-from-the-ashes-with-125...

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If you go for a full curve over the space, then yes.

But like NAND, there is room for, I don’t know what to call it, “quantization”? You get a few values out instead of just binary.

My guess is, like other issues of precision, errors can get out of hand if you are not careful.

But being an EE in another life, I can tell you the power waste and slowness of ALUs is kinda wild.

I definitely believe that Gaming on CPUs is like ML on GPUs. Slow, and waiting for something more appropriate to come along.

Don’t know if these guys are the ones to do it (and they are, ahem, not alone). But someone will deliver 100x to 1000x boost either in speed, power efficiency, or both.

You reminded me the anecdote about every SID chip sounding different. If you hear a recording of a C64 made song, it’s unique to that chip (and somewhat to the machine as well, timing, crystal, etc.).

Different generations of chips, or various cheap clone chips, sure.

Within one generation, evidence of significant differences seems weaker. Sure, manufacturing had loose tolerances, you could end up with a "faulty" chip, but most SIDs sounded the same. You could also end up with a 6510 that crashed after 30 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yadWu7hs4MU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n73-ipWMCCY

Its a myth.

Veritasium did a video on this 4 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg

I'd assume it does some type of calibrate per device (regularly?) or the design is such that it's differential so things cancel out. Note it's also on 28nm for the analogue bits because yes it's harder.

Since no sane person expects reliable results from these chatbots, unreliable analog implementations should be fine.

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