‘Momentum Computing’ Pushes Technology’s Thermodynamic Limits
In case you had not noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, while data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours each year—comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry. And as computer circuitry gets ever smaller and more densely packed, it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat.
Now physicist James Crutchfield of the University of California, Davis, and his graduate student Kyle Ray have proposed a new