Tomorrow’s computers might break through a canonical boundary on information processing.
In case you hadn't noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, and data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours every year, comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry.
In that case, it hardly seems a practical solution. “The conventional wisdom for a long time has been that the energy dissipation in reversible computing is proportional to speed,” says computer scientist Michael Frank of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. The researchers considered how to use the idea to implement a logical operation called a bit swap, in which two bits simultaneously flip their value: 1 becomes 0, and vice versa. Here no information is discarded; it's just reconfigured, meaning that, in theory, it carries no erasure cost.
“While our proposal is grounded in a specific substrate to be as concrete as possible and to accurately estimate the required energies,” Crutchfield says, “the proposal is much more general than that.” It should work, in principle, with normal electronic circuits or even with tiny, carefully insulated mechanical devices that can carry momentum in their moving parts.
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