An experimental computer chip called Ice River can reuse the energy put into it, researchers say.
A regular computer chip cannot reuse energy. All the electrical energy it draws to perform computations immediately becomes useless heat. Your phone or laptop will “use energy once and then throw it away,” says Michael Frank, a scientist at Vaire Computing, the London company where the new test chip was made. When your device is working hard, you can feel the warmth of all that wasted energy.
In data centers, large amounts of water and hardworking fans keep computers from overheating. AI demands powerful computer chips that draw more electricity than those in the past. As the technology proliferates, the environmental and energy costs of computing keep on rising.
The new chip, tested in August, drew around 30 percent less energy than a regular chip performing the same computation. The system was reusing a portion of its electrical energy instead of wasting it as heat. “This is quite exciting,” says Aatmesh Shrivastava, a computer engineer at Northeastern University in Boston. “We all want a computing system where we can recover energy.”
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