Base 10 computers

E. Lusive

10th April 2007 - 05:58 PM

I was just reading an article in how stuff works about base 10 computers that said it would be possible to wire them up, but would be very expensive. For any computer guru's out there: will they ever implement information flow other than base 2 in computers? and why is it so expensive? I can see the advantages right away that a base 10 or higher computer could offer in terms of efficiency and information transfer rates. So where is the bottleneck in this branch of tech?

plasma_guy

10th April 2007 - 06:17 PM

Base-2 is compatible with ON-OFF states or two voltage states. Something like Base-10 would require 10 voltage states, which while not impossible, is not compatible with current digital low-voltage CMOS technology. Because each of the 10 states has to be separated from the others, so a wider voltage range is expected. Going from 2 to 10 estimate 5x wider (~5V).

MarvL

10th April 2007 - 06:48 PM

QUOTE (E. Lusive+Apr 10 2007, 10:58 AM)

So where is the bottleneck in this branch of tech?

Modems use lots of symbol states, as does any sort of modulation scheme.

The value of a two state ON/OFF symbol encoding scheme is that you can use brute force to determine the state. It's either REALLY OFF or REALLY ON and you can be pretty sloppy in between. Consequently it's cheap and fast.

The bottleneck is finding devices that will reliably and economically store multiple states.

E. Lusive

11th April 2007 - 07:13 PM

Do you think that this sort of wiring scheme would be more efficient with up and coming photonic circuitry?

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