Slashdot Mirror
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."
Interesting...kind of like a turbocharger for a CPU.
Quick, someone tell the physicits! I'm sure they forgot all about this.
More like someone tell the journalists (the people who actually WROTE this article). It happens all the time that a scientist says something offhand like "and you could use this for processing power", and a journalist misinterprets this to mean that it's both feasible, and commercially viable.
AccountKiller
The southern hemisphere says hi! We're still in the middle of an intense heatwave where the temperature inside is 304.5K.