A group of University of Florida (UF) researchers thinks so and is working on these "reversible" computers which promise to be more energy efficient, smaller and faster than our current systems.
"The fastest processors available today dissipate on the order of 100 watts of power in the form of heat," or about as much as a large light bulb, said Michael Frank, a UF assistant professor. "The main reason you can’t run them faster is because they get too hot. If you could make them produce less heat in the first place, you could end up running them faster overall, especially if you want to pack a lot of chips together."
He plans to achieve this goal through reversible computing. But what's reversible computing?
When we say reversible computing, we mean performing computation in such a way that any previous state of the computation can always be reconstructed given a description of the current state. Such a computation is "reversible" since the reconstruction of previous states could be applied to allow progressing backwards through the computer's sequence of states, in a time-reversed fashion. Maintaining the property of reversibility requires that no information about the state of the computer can ever be thrown away.
There are more explanations in the first document about how this process can save energy.
Reversible computing seeks to configure integrated circuits in such a way that they can use their current state to recover previous states -- in other words, rather than building up and tossing away unwanted information, the chips "uncompute" it fluidly, with little power expenditure or heat generation. Researchers hope to achieve such results by incorporating tiny oscillators, or spring-like devices, in the circuits. In theory, these oscillators could recapture most of the energy expended in a calculation and reuse it other calculations. The concept is somewhat analogous to hybrid cars now on the market that take the energy generated during braking and recycle it into electricity used to power the car.
But what about real products?
Frank currently is trying to persuade major chipmakers to direct more of their research-and-development resources toward reversible technologies. He recently delivered a talk on the subject at IBM's research facility in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. A number of managers there agreed that IBM should take a closer look at reversible computing, he said.
For more information, you can a presentation Frank gave at Stony Brook, NY, in last May, "Reversible Computing: Quantum Computing's Practical Cousin." He compared reversible computing with quantum computing, and "argued that Reversible Computing can reasonably be expected to have significantly more economic impact on the computer industry as a whole than will Quantum Computing."
You can have access the abstract and to the presentation in various formats from the Reversible Computing Project Writings page.
Source: Aaron Hoover (writer) and Michael Frank (source), University of Florida, October 31, 2003
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