[dahart]

Digitizing the output of an analog computation doesn’t make it a digital computation. It’s still analog. The ultimate computation is not binary 1/0, it gets converted to binary after the computation. We may be able to save time or energy by changing representation.

Imagine a NxN matrix-matrix multiply. The computation part is (naively) N^3 multiplies. The conversion back to digital is only N^2 operations, and those operations may be much simpler than digital multipliers. If there’s a way to do the N^3 multiplies as analog, then we can potentially save a lot by converting to and from binary to enable the analog phase.