energy is work, and cpus do no work. from a purely electrical standpoint, they are resistive heaters. some energy goes into switching the state of transistors, but that state change generates heat.

basically, if you flip a power switch, the energy doesn’t go into the state of the switch (which is information), but the act of flipping it (which is work).

Information is entropy. The 80W is going out as heat, noise, vibrations, radiation.

If we could run a theoretical computer which is 100% efficient, it could compute forever with the same electrons.

Information doesn’t hold energy themselves, so yes the CPU produces 80W of heat, no matter what computation they do.

(Also it’s pretty hard to define what’s information, people generally talk about information entropy, which is different from thermodynamic entropy. This can be confusing).

But your instinct is correct, one cannot reduce entropy without spending energy. And the kind of computation computers do today does change entropy, so some energy must be dissipated as heat to do computation. This is the Landauer’s principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer’s_principle

Also you need to remember that energy can not be destroyed or created. Expending energy to do something doesn’t mean there will be less energy in the end.

and that’s a no-no.

Not sure why you think that? If information holds no energy then creating it without converting energy isn’t against any physical laws.

Hehe, I can see each comment have their own definition of ‘information’. Not sure mine is better…

There seem to me to be two types of ‘information’ depending on perspective: ‘energy entropy’ and ‘information entropy’. Information-entropy are what is ‘interesting’ to normal people, observers. After all we evolved to observe our environment. A small black dot on a white wall are almost indifferent in overall energy-entropy, but is high information-entropy to us, the observer (especially those that says “Don’t Touch!” !). I think that dichotomy causes some confusion ?

We can view ‘information’ as the ‘configurations of X energy units’. Configurations can be complex, multilayered and interdependent with emergent configurations popping in/out. Each configuration is a system that are more or less stable, so information can come and go, while the energy units are staying - somewhere else. An ‘oscillator’ is one of the most stable and simple 1D (a->middle->b) information systems that just changes configuration states at regular intervals in a regular order.

However, we cant have or detect information without energy in some configuration. That strongly indicates that we indeed have a point where energy and information converge and at that point, information is energy. At that convergence point 1 energy unit = 1 bit.

So all information is energy, but the black dot on the wall says “no! there’s a difference”, so we are back to ‘interestingness’.

I think the problem is that life evolved as observers. Observers needs something like the ‘free energy’ principle and reacts to surprise. We notice sharp gradients of input. The black dot on the wall have potential entropy but only combined with an observers configuration. So the low energy black dot wall influenced an external high energy system much much more than its energy configuration indicated. Observers filter reality through ‘observational frames’, and information as energy-entropy, gets transformed to information-entropy - “interestingness”.

So, we have energy, complexity and an observer axis in this 3D information model. However, that is hard to imagine, so if we perhaps imagine two separate 2D planes: An ‘energy-entropy’ plane, with energy vs configurations axis, and let that evolve enough complexity. Then at some point somewhere, the first observer configuration evolves and instantly creates an orthogonal (right angles) 2D ‘information-entropy’ plane with energy vs interestingness axis. A plane where energy gradients is the information. Our observer reality is both a subset of the whole, but are also creating new novel information of both configuration types in the universe. It is a new branch of information configurations growing, actuated by energy entropy, but steered by information entropy.

Boolean logic is a natural outgrowth from the converging 1-bit configuration proto-state at 0.0, while waves and thermo dynamics comes from many of these emergent configurations influencing each other. That is all Entropy and Information, but observers add an ‘potential entropy’ dimension - interestingness - to raw ‘kinetic’ energy entropy. Observers notice deviation from average as information. It is notable that both very high and very low energy entropy is very alluring to us, so such phenomenons create the same high value in the information entropy plane. Maybe it would be valuable to divide entropy into kinetic and potential types?

A bit speculative/abstract oc, but interesting (pun intended)… Anyway, both information types/sets seem valid to me, and both evolve from tiny 1+ energy units interacting and configuring itself fractally.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, per the law of conservation of energy. But information certainly can.

You calculate server room hvac based on the electrical usage. There’s no difference between a server and a resistive heater. If they are consuming 1800w then it’s all turning into heat.

the reverse. information is a form of energy.