News Intel's CEO says Moore's Law is slowing to a three-year cadence, but it's not dead yet

[bit_user]

On the other side, if you have 1 transistor doing the work of 2, it produces half the heat.

You keep assuming the power per transistor is the same for multi-state as binary, and we keep telling you that's probably not going to hold.

Most of those difficulties come from analog computers not being digital.

Multivalued transistors are digital. They are not equivalent to analog computers.

I think the point was about how/when intermediate states (i.e. neither the lowest nor highest) are quantized. In 2-state logic, you can easily reduce noise through saturation. It multi-state logic, it seems to me like it behaves closer to an analog circuit.

I believe the way multi-bit NAND works is by using essentially using the equivalent of a DAC to write the cells and an ADC to read them. I wonder if you wouldn't need to periodically insert stages like that, to restore signal integrity, in large circuits using multi-state logic.

 

[jasonf2]

I believe the way multi-bit NAND works is by using essentially using the equivalent of an DAC to write the cells and an ADC to read them. I wonder if you wouldn't need to periodically insert stages like that, to restore signal integrity, in large circuits using multi-state logic.

This is probably the crux of the whole thing if trying to emulate a binary system. You would need a hardware converter/emulator to bring it back to binary. That is going to at least double your latency (you will need a clock to calculate and a clock to convert) and increase complexity. If you don't emulate, but rather go native multi state, the question will be how many states? 3..10...1000? You would still have to have a converter of some form to quantify and normalize your result.

This also says nothing about the fact that traditional gate logic is entirely based on Boolean math and a multi-state transistor is anything but Boolean in nature.

 

[vehekos]

You keep assuming the power per transistor is the same for multi-state as binary, and we keep telling you that's probably not going to hold.

Those are independent things. The heat per transistor, and the number of transistors needed to do the same work.
Multivalued logic needs less transistors, and less layers of transistors for the same functionality.