Re: Things I never thought would appear

Microsoft wants Three Mile Island to fuel its AI power needs

Is anyone reseaching how to make computers more energy-efficient?

Not anymore.
"carbon neutral" advertising/green-washing is passe'.
The only reason for energy efficiency is longer battery life
but with high energy batteries, that's low on the priority list now.

I recall Feynman writing on that topic.

kinda:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics"
was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959.
Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms
as a more robust form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time.
Versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, but it went largely unnoticed until the 1980s.


    https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
    https://www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/teaching/415/papers/feynman-plenty.html
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics
by Richard P. Feynman


    https://www.americanscientist.org/article/computers-that-can-run-backwards
Physicist Richard Feynman showed that it is theoretically possible to create an adiabatic reversible computer.
Feynman took an interest in reversible computing in the 1970s
because he wanted to know whether there is a fundamental lower limit to how much energy is needed to carry out a computation.
What kinds of computers attain that limit?
He knew of the Landauer limit, which puts a lower bound on the amount of energy lost to heat
when a single bit of information is lost.
He asked: If we use reversible circuits, which lose no bits,
what is the minimum energy required to get the computation done?
He eventually concluded that there is no theoretical minimum.

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