mjgerm's comments

Roughly speaking, an N-level digital logic system requires O(N) transistors in order to buffer/force a signal into one of N states, but only performs O(log(N)) more work with them relative to binary.

Without the buffering step, you'll eventually get the middle logic levels drifting (e.g. your "1"s become "0"s or "2"s). Binary gets this for "free" because there's no middle states; this doesn't apply just to a simple buffer, similar details apply to the implementation of all other gates (many of which are rather awkward to implement).

Analog works out for rough calculations because you can skip the buffering process, at the expense of having your calculation's precision limited by the linearity of your circuit.

SSDs are more of a special case, because to my knowledge they're not really doing work on multi-level logic outside of the storage cells. They pump current in on one axis of a matrix, read it out on the other, and then ADC it back to binary as fast as possible before doing any other logic.

Random sidebar: I don't see any constraint like this for mechanical computers, so a base-10 mechanical computer doesn't strike me as any more unreasonable than a base-2 mechanical computer (i.e. slop and tolerance is independent of gear size). In fact, it might be reasonable to say you should use the largest gears that the technology of your time can support (sorry Babbage).

6 million gallons/yr / 40 inches/yr (average annual rainfall in NY) = 5.5 acres

You have to admit that there is some gap between "I want the latest re-rounded corners on app icons" (which fits into that category neatly) and "I don't want 4 years of unpatched 0-days still open on my phone" (which I'd argue does not).

I think the answer amounts to "anyone who has at least a rack full of Dell/HPE hardware".

Dell manages an annual revenue of greater than $20B, so on-prem HW is clearly going strong, regardless of whether or not you think it should be.

Looking at the hardware, I'd wag somewhere in the $2-3M range. Depends on how big of a profit margin they want to make or how scrappy they feel like being (could probably go as low as ~$1M if they can make it up in volume).

If they're following the typical 1/5x pricing model for support, that'd be roughly $500k/yr/rack. But it's also hard to do that while simultaneously describing Dell as "rapacious".

Roughly, the power of a digital system is sum of the static power and the dynamic power (P=1/2 CV^2*F).

1. Discrete logic chips tend to be built in substantially larger process nodes (microns vs nanometers) that are less efficient. This means higher leakage current and more static power.

2. Discrete logic has to drive traces on a PCB, which have substantially higher capacitance (C) and therefore use more power getting across a board.

3. Discrete logic operates at higher voltages. Contrast 5V TTL vs. 1V core voltage inside a processor. Power is proportional to the voltage squared.

4. A microprocessor running even at low speed can replace a massive number of discrete logic chips, so for simple solutions F is low. If you're doing something very simple and interrupt-driven, F can be in the tens-hundreds of kHz.

Consequently, there's a whole lot more of both static and dynamic power with discrete logic than with a uC.

You are now debugging a distributed system.