> which plausibly has far more precision than a float32
If that was true, then a DRAM cell could represent 32 bits instead of one bit. But the analog world is noisy and lossy, so you couldn't get anywhere near 32 bits of precision/accuracy.
Yes, very carefully designed analog circuits can get over 20 bits of precision, say A/D converters, but they are huge (relative to digital circuits), consume a lot of power, have low bandwidth as compared to GHz digital circuits, and require lots of shielding and power supply filtering.
This is spit-balling, but the types of circuits you can create for a neural network type chip is certainly under 8 bits, maybe 6 bits. But it gets worse. Unlike digital circuits where signal can be copied losslessly, a chain of analog circuits compounds the noise and accuracy losses stage by stage. To make it work you'd need frequent requantization to prevent getting nothing but mud out.
You can get 8bit analog signal resolution reasonablyish easyish. The Hagen mode [1] of BrainScaleS [2] is essentially that. But.. yeah. No way in hell you are getting more than 16bit with that kind of technology, let alone more.
And those things are huge which lead to very small network sizes. This is partially due to the fabrication node, but also simply because there is even less well developed tooling for analog circuits compared to digital ones compared to software compilers
If that was true, then a DRAM cell could represent 32 bits instead of one bit. But the analog world is noisy and lossy, so you couldn't get anywhere near 32 bits of precision/accuracy.
Yes, very carefully designed analog circuits can get over 20 bits of precision, say A/D converters, but they are huge (relative to digital circuits), consume a lot of power, have low bandwidth as compared to GHz digital circuits, and require lots of shielding and power supply filtering.
This is spit-balling, but the types of circuits you can create for a neural network type chip is certainly under 8 bits, maybe 6 bits. But it gets worse. Unlike digital circuits where signal can be copied losslessly, a chain of analog circuits compounds the noise and accuracy losses stage by stage. To make it work you'd need frequent requantization to prevent getting nothing but mud out.