For Michael Frank, efficiency has always been a major preoccupation. As a student in the 1990s, he was originally interested in artificial intelligence. But once he realized how much energy the technology would use, he took his research in another direction. “I started getting interested in the physical limits of computation,” he said. “What’s the most efficient computer you can possibly build?”
He soon found a candidate that took advantage of a quirk of thermodynamics: a device whose computations could run backward as well as forward. By never deleting data, such a “reversible” computer would avoid wasted energy.
Now, as progress in traditional computing is slowing — new chips are running into fundamental physical limitations (opens a new tab) that prevent them from getting smaller — reversible computing could keep computational progress going.
“There aren’t that many other ways to improve power,” said Christof Teuscher (opens a new tab), who researches unconventional approaches to computing at Portland State University. “Reversible computing is this really beneficial, really exciting way of saving potentially orders of magnitude.”
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