Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. When broken, pieces of plastic, batteries, and circuit boards fly out. It's an act of vandalism and such a shocking waste of money and resources that it sounds ridiculous. But the truth is that every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is, at a fundamental level, even more wasteful than this.
It all goes back to decisions made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data that inevitably generates large amounts of waste heat. For too long, we've been using useless computers. But with the rise of artificial intelligence pushing computing power consumption to new heights, this seemingly insignificant decision may be about to harm us. You may need to redesign your computing from the ground up.
Thankfully, we know exactly what to do. It involves a somewhat unlikely trick: it forces the processor to do everything twice, once in the forward direction and then in the reverse direction. “Reversible computing is much more energy efficient than traditional computing, and this may be the way we should be building computers,” he says. hannah early at Vaire Computing, a reversible computing company based in the UK.
Increased energy efficiency is the result of a thermodynamic trick that has been known since the 1970s, but was never used for the following reasons:
Source: www.newscientist.com
