This Experimental Computer Chip Reuses Energy
upstart writes:
If the technology can be scaled up, it could help make AI cheaper and more efficient:
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.
[...] 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."
To develop Ice River, Frank and the team at Vaire reimagined two inefficient features of modern computer chips.
First, chips sold now waste energy by erasing information. A typical chip's logic - the circuitry and rules that determine the way the chip processes information - only works in one direction. When you do a computation, the original 1s and 0s are erased, generating heat. IceRiver instead uses reversible logic, which allows it to un-compute and get the original information back. This avoids losing heat to erasures.
Second, modern chips waste energy when their voltage rapidly changes. Like a hammer coming down, the power supply slams 1s into 0s or vice versa. This allows for very fast computation, but those rapid changes give off heat.
In contrast, IceRiver uses an approach called adiabatic computing, in which voltages gradually go up and down. "You can think of [the energy] as sloshing back and forth," Frank says. It's more like a pendulum than a hammer. The system can partly keep itself going and reuse energy in the next operations. Importantly, the power supply doing all this is housed on the chip itself.
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