Landauer's principle

It's unavoidable.

So I'll explain why that is, starting with the discussion of Landauer's principle, which gives sort of the fundamental physical motivation for why old-style irreversible computing is not good enough.

And then I'll talk about definitions of models of reversible computing that you can derive from the fundamental thermodynamics.

Don't need that.

And so when we, essentially when you ground a circuit node, you're dissipating all those, that KeV of stored electrical energy to heat.

Okay, and so we really want to avoid that.

And for a long time people said, oh, well reversible computing's not relevant because we're so far from Landauer's principle, why do we care? But look, These multipliers are real.

It's not just thermal limits that are important, it's this large factor, larger than thermal limit amount of energy per circuit node that we inevitably are gonna have.

Well, it is the modern equivalent of saying God did it.

To simulate our universe down to the quantum level, complete with conscious entities experiencing continuous reality, you run into severe thermodynamic limits such as Landauer's Principle.

What's Landauer's Principle?

It states that any logical operation that irreversibly manipulates information must dissipate heat.

The computing power and energy required to simulate the universe would be greater than the energy that actually exists within the universe.

... especially if you can lower the dependence on rare earth or, like, transition metals that are hard to source, like cobalt, reducing cobalt in batteries.

One of the things I think is very fundamentally important is, um, if we can get close to Landauer limit for, uh, compute Energy efficiency

Can you, uh, explain Landauer limit?

Yeah.

So if you look at, um, how much energy we spend per, uh, like, FLOP or compute, it has followed the Moore's Law type behavior, but it's gotten exponentially more efficient.

Yeah, no.

And the, one of the things we had to do is dissipate heat, because, like, as, as these, uh, computations are happening, it's producing heat, which has to happen, but then we have to dissipate it.

So, like, if we can get close to the Landauer limit for how efficiently we do computation, that's amazing for humanity, right? Because that means now we're doing computation, which is probably one of the most fundamental things we do as humanity, but as efficiently as possible from an energy perspective, which is the real currency in the universe.