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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If a transistor is above a certain voltage level it turns on. If it’s below another level, it turns off. Basing everything on this on and off nature makes things nice and simple. Using intermediate values would mean we’d need to keep components balanced a lot better. And then we’d need to come up with new components. We know how to make a binary adder with binary logic gates. How do you do that with trinary?
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