Magnetic microprocessors without electronics would use a million times less energy per flop than today's computers, according to University of California-Berkeley researchers (UCB). This process is so effective, scientists believe that consuming the lowest amount of power allowed by the second law of thermodynamics.
Currently, computers work with electricity, which means electrons move and generate waste heat. But a magnetic microprocessor would not require electrons using instead the polarity of magnets at nano-scale to represent digits 0 and 1 of binary memory. If nano magnets are positioned together, their poles will interact, serving as a transistor and thereby offering simple logical operations.
Jeffrey Bokor, a professor of electronic engineering and computer science of UCSF, along with graduate Brian Lambson, are trying to develop just such magnetic computer. Their aim is to build a computer capable of operating at the limit of Landauer's Principle, at room temperature, energy translates into a loss of 18 milli-electron volts per operation.
This value, 18 thousandths of an electron volt is the worst breath of energy - by comparison, is about half the thermal energy of atoms at room temperature. A computer that would use such an infinitesimal energy would be an important advance, says Bokor. If the machine would operate in low temperature conditions, the principle would be even better because Landauer limit is proportional to temperature.
In tests conducted in the laboratory, Lambson and Bokor found that a simple operation of memory, such as deleting a magnetic bit can be carried out with a very similar energy dissipation limit Landauer, if not even similar to this.
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