Re:Koomey's law
by tedsanders on Friday March 31, 2017 @09:22PM
(#14009817)
Nothing against your specific comment, but in general I wish that the Landauer limit had less cultural importance and salience in discussions of computation & energy. It's a simple result, but the assumptions leading to it are quite subtle. First, it relies on the widely misinterpreted second law of thermodynamics and second, it relies on the subtle notion of 'erasure'. In loose analogy, it reminds me of quantum mechanics - "what's the definition of a measurement?" "It's anything that causes the system to act like it was measured." "What's the definition of information erasure?" "It's anything that causes the system to obey the Landauer limit." In any case, this limit is so far away it's practically theory (though experiments purport to show it), and since the limit can be exceeded in theory, it doesn't seem like a useful principle to guide us.
That's because our computers continually destroy and re-create bits, instead of reusing them. Google "fredkin toffoli conservative logic reversible computing".
Edit: I am aware that claim sounds hilarious when expressed in this simplified way. Don't fret, it's hard science.
Computation, on the other hand, is still no where near the theoretical limit[1]. We literally use more than 10,000,000x the theoretical limit to erase a bit of data.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle