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What do you think would be harder to implement in a fab on a budget in the future? A chip full of large gates that can handle 7 voltage levels stably, or a chip with 5x [1] as many of the smallest gates that physics and logistics allow one to build?

[1] If memory servers, adders and cache access and a bunch of other logic typically require O(nlog₂n) gates in binary, but O(nlog₃n) in ternary, Which means as the native integer size increases, bases greater than 2 scale better.



There's a huge constant factor involved, which is why we still use binary. As in many algorithms, asymptotic analysis doesn't tell the full story.




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