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PC's Waste Heat Could Add To Processing Power
Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons — photonic computing — is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons — ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or 'off' while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or 'on.' Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature — and data — intact for a long time."
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermal dynamics!
That said. It may save some power converting loss head back again making it more efficient.
But they way that most people use computers I don't know if there is a benefit. We rarely run at full CPU Heat kicking.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.
While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.
This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
This, IMHO is an academic concept at best. State definition by thermal state has been done in research before but it is slow, and trying to collect the waste energy in the form of heat and re-use it as the byproduct in another state machine sounds a bit questionable.
Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Phonons travel at the speed of sound in their medium, which is 100,000 times slower than the speed of electrical signals or light. If you've got a phononic circuit running at a Ghz clock rate, signals can only travel a few microns. This size limit severely restricts the number of individual components you can have in your circuit.
Go light, or go home.
Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of thermal dynamics!
Yeah, except nothing proposed here would contradict the laws of thermodynamics (not thermal dynamics, by the way). You and your joke failed. So sorry.
Could just put your PC under your desk...
To be fair, VTEC does allow for a milder cam profile at lower rpms, while allowing for a much more aggressive cam profile for additional horsepower at higher rpms. Maybe that's what the OP was getting at.
It's also conceivable that one day we discover that everything in the universe is already being used for computing. That Brownian motion is just a side effect of the computations happening at every point in the universe.