3 ms·
Pie-in-the-sky idea here, but only irreversible computations produce heat. Maybe in the distant future we can make chips that do many parallel computations of
by Simon_says 9y ago
Pie-in-the-sky idea here, but only irreversible computations produce heat. Maybe in the distant future we can make chips that do many parallel computations of all branches reversibly, and only make the results irreversible once the correct branch is known?
- dfox 9y agoIn theory, irreversible computations have to produce heat, while reversible do not. In practice this is mostly irrelevant, because the heat involved is so minuscule that there will always be other significantly larger sources of inefficiency involved. Also it is somewhat questionable whether one could actually construct physical realization of useful logic primitive that is truly reversible.