Comment Reuse of electrons. (Score 1) 118
As I understand reversible computing it's basically a recycling of data to preserve electrons before they are allowed to disappate as heat. The idea being that the more you reuse an electron the less heat a chip will create. The problem is not so much that the chips aren't designed this way today its got more to do with how fast chips lose electrons as heat due to the fabrication technology they are built with.
As most hardware savy people know, the smaller the chip the less space between transistors there is for electrons to be lost as heat. So as fab tech improves it requires less energy to keep a chip running because less energy is being lost between transistors [just keeping the chip functioning without data corruption]. As fab tech improves we will get to a point where it becomes feasible to use reversible computing because there will be so little energy being lost in this way. In other words more heat will be being produced not from the current leakage of a chip but from data waste caused when a bit is no longer needed. Last I heard, that's around the 5nm mark.
There is also reversible computation, the software equivilant of this which is an interesting read imo.