I like this quote regards analog devices
[quote]Archimedes made a great discovery that digital representation of numbers is exponentially more efficient than analog ones (sand pile sizes). Many subsequent analog devices yielded unimpressive results. -Leonid Levin[/quote]
As I've said previously lower energy consumption, and cheaper manufacturing tech is required. I believe that eventually we will transition to synthetic biology. Which is why medical investments in tissue engineering are very good. The brain has about 100 Billion cells, but almost all of those cells are in the cerebellum.
Judging by this picture http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/science-society/watching-brain-working, that's about 10% of the size of the brain. But each neuron tends to have 1000s of synapses, so there are countless trillions of components.
But it is likely digital logic can be carried out by molecules, even if we had to resort to nanomechanical systems, but perhaps molecular electronics is possible still...
Perhaps some form of protein-like logic element could be imbued into circuit like multimolecule machines in membraneous like areas within microscopic cells with some simple genetically guided circuit construction, Some manner of intercellular communication, and you'd have self repairing self replicating circuitry, which in some multicellular machine would amount to quite alot. Let's assume 100M such components per cell, then for an organ similar to the liver with about 240Billion cells, that would give 24 Quintillion logic elements. Operating even at a few Mhz speeds, such a system would probably beat even hypothetical Yottaflop supercomputers in processing power, but would likely consume only a few tens of watts.
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