this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Reversible Computing
In theory, we could make computers consume orders of magnitude less power, enabling extreme miniaturization of systems.
When I was learning computing on the electron level I was floored just how much electricity is wasted being converted to heat turning a 1 into a 0 and theorized that a system which would knock electrons around rather than just erasing them, cool to see it's becoming a real thing.
I guess we can look forward to superconducting Light Emitting Capacitors that have 100% efficiency, with the unideal component being centralized on a thermoelectric unit to capture waste heat, since that was the other thing that I was successfully theorizing about at the time.
I still don't quite get what this is. From what I've just read it's transistors with zero heat dissipation caused by zero-ing out the RAM.
So okay, we have perfect RAM which never needs to be zero'd out, and 1 can be easily be reversed to a 0 if we know the operation that yielded it.... but what is the actual computational benefit here?
For a computer to have reversible RAM, doesn't that mean we would need to store more computation in order to roll back operations (and again, why would we want to?)