Its absolutely not the same thing from a hardware perspective. Normal components always operate on bits. We see "5", but the computer sees (at least) 3 bits. It then sends its output as bits to the next one. A 5 must require 3 wires, or 3 cycles of the clock over a single wire.
Building a computer where each wire can encode multiple bits of data at the exact same time fundamentally changes the way operations are done. The entire thing would need to be built in a different way, with different consequences.
It might be a bad idea, or impossible, but it would be different.
