This test chip, called Ice River, recycles energy that typical computer chips waste as heat. One goal of creating it is to make artificial intelligence more energy efficient.
You’ve probably felt your laptop heat up before. All that warmth comes from wasted energy as the computer performs function after function. But an experimental computer chip can reuse the electrical energy running through it. Kathryn Hulick reports for SN on Ice River, a new chip that can recover some of its wasted energy.
🔨 Un-computing with reversible logic
Traditional chips waste energy in a few ways. Their circuitry only processes information in one direction, with every new computation erasing previous ones, generating heat. They also fritter away electricity through rapid voltage changes. Like a hammer slamming down, the coursing electricity smashes 1s into 0s or the other way around, a rapid change that creates speedy computations but also heat.
Ice River modifies these two wasteful phenomena. Rather than process information in only one direction, it employs what’s called reversible logic, allowing it to un-compute and recover original information, which avoids wasting heat on erasures. And instead of smashing 1s into 0s, it uses an approach called adiabatic computing, where voltages fluctuate gradually — it acts like a pendulum instead of a hammer.
Tested in August by its makers at startup Vaire Computing, this chip used around 30 percent less energy compared to a traditional chip performing the same computations, reusing some of its electrical energy.
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