2023-10-15 14:10:21
Macroscopic illustration of the operating principle of a reservoir computer: Sound figure patterns are created in the sand on a thin sheet of metal by acoustic waves. Image: Okapia
Today’s computer hardware has one core problem: it is extremely inefficient. A solution could be offered by unconventional computer architectures that work with electron spins instead of charges.
It is no small contribution that digitalization makes to climate change: its global CO₂ footprint already reaches the level of international air traffic. Against this background, one could almost call for a “heating law” for computers, because today’s microprocessors are electric heaters with data processing as a by-product. Since the tiny transistors cannot store the intermediate results of their calculations, the processor has to constantly move data back and forth between the central processing unit, the CPU, and the RAM. This ensures brisk electrical traffic of the bits through the micro- and nanometer-sized structures and horrendous friction losses and the resulting heat.
“Ninety percent of the energy you put into a computer is burned away in heat,” explains Helmut Schultheiss in his office in the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf. The physicist researches in the field of so-called magnonics, which aims to replace the flowing electrons of today’s bits with a radically new information carrier: electron spin. If this were to succeed, it would be a shift towards greener information processing.
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