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[florianix]

Originally Posted by Scatty

Which is probably the point of all problems - "hard"ware. There's been non-public development and testing of new form(s) of completely different, to what is officially available today, branch of computer(s) for quite some years now. Half-organic, biologically based processing to be more precise. But it's very hard to find anything on that in any news and it will probably still take many and many more years before it could even be considered widely available. If, and when it will, that might be turning point in backwards compatibility which we are experiencing with today's conventional hardware, not counting some of the other advantages it would have.

Those technologies have only been very basic research topics that are far from leaving some research labs, and I really doubt that most of them ever will.

Most of them are more usefull to e.g. print circuits on a price-tag very cheap, but less for improving computing power.

The technologies that will increase computing-power/speed in the mid term will probably be the next steps in semiconductor processes (maybe GaN, which is now already commercially available for very high speed transistors).

In fact, it doesn't really matter *which* HW-technolgy a computer is based on (there already were mechanical, electro-mechanical, tube, transistor based technologies of what is more or less still the same logical implementation of a computer).

About accuracy: Modern computers already can already do calculations with unlimited accuracy (just a matter of computing power), and even standard single or double precision outperform any analog computer by far.
Thats the reason why those are obsolete since many decades (and never will come back).

I see fuzzy-logic, neural networks (and many other things that were/are considered "revolutionary" for some years) as software-topics. Just about algorithms, not hardware...

However, amazing how this thread turned from ancient computers to future technology...