“The new device is built from arrays of resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells… The team was able to combine the speed of analog computation with the accuracy normally associated with digital processing. Crucially, the chip was manufactured using a commercial production process, meaning it could potentially be mass-produced.”
Article is based on this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0
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.
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.
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.
The Nature paper says they’ve done a proof of concept with a few bits, and concluded that they can reproduce it with cutting edge processors. That’s akin to ‘Mice survive cancer longer’ becoming ‘We’ve cured cancer forever’.
They might be right, but I’m not holding my breath.
AI hype in a nutshell
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.
link thanks
" Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg
Analog is literally computing on the fabric of the universe.