Imagine taking a hammer to your laptop. You break it and pieces of plastic, batteries and circuit boards fly. It would be an act of vandalism, an astonishing waste of money and resources, so senseless it seems. But the truth is that every time we use a computer, we are dealing with a machine that is even more wasteful than this at the basic level.
It all stems from a decision made decades ago about the deep workings of computer logic and how these machines delete data, a process that necessarily creates a large amount of hot waste. For a long time, we have been confused with wasteful computers. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which has pushed computing power demands to new heights, this seemingly inconsequential decision could be about to bite. IT may need to be restructured from scratch.
Fortunately, we know exactly what to do. It involves a seemingly impossible trick: getting the processors to do everything twice, once forward and then reverse. “Reversible computing can be much more energy efficient than conventional computing, and it’s potentially the way we should build computers,” he says. Hannah Early at UK-based reversible computing company Vaire Computing.
Increasing energy efficiency is the result of a thermodynamic trick we’ve known since the 1970s, but never used…
