I realise (/think?) that CPUs essentially treat two different voltages as a 1 or 0, but what stops us from using 3 or more different voltages? Wouldn’t that exponentially increase the CPU’s throughput by allowing for decisions with greater than two outcomes to be calculated in one cycle? This would presumably mean that a LOT of stuff written for base 2 would need to be updated to base 3 (in this example), but I can’t imagine that’s the only reason we haven’t done this.
I feel like I’ve explained that poorly, but hopefully you get the gist.
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You’ve got it wrong. We started off using analog computers which basically varied the voltages almost infinetly between two target points (say 1v and 7v) and could change the data being sent by modulating the voltage where the target thinking 1v or 7v should be expected could still have data if the signal bounced to 5v. The trouble with that is there would be a crappy signal with a lot of noise and it wasn’t very accurate. Then we realized digital signals (basically two set values or on/off) gave us better signal quality with more accurate data being transmitted.
It mostly comes down to signal quality and noise.
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