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 a shocking waste of money and resources, as ridiculous as it sounds. 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 as the rise of artificial intelligence pushes 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 may be the way we should build computers,” said Vaire Computing, a UK-based reversible computing company. says Hannah Early.
Improving energy efficiency is the result of a thermodynamic trick that has been known since the 1970s, but has never been used in practice for several reasons:
(Tag translation) Environment
