Let me clarify what I mean:
If you put 80W of electrical energy into an ideal electrical heater, it will put out 80W of heat energy.
But what if you put 80W of electrical energy into a CPU and let it calculate things, creating new information?
Will it also output exactly 80W of heat?

Or is some energy transformed into “information”, so the CPU will radiate less heat?

My instinct is that if information isn’t energy, then you could theoretically create it (thereby reducing entropy) without expending energy, and that’s a no-no.

But if it is energy, then a CPU running a random number generator (creating no information) at max load would get hotter than one doing actual calculations. Which also sounds wrong.

(I’m neither a physicist nor a computer scientist, in case that wasn’t obvious)

  • Sims@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    Will it also output exactly 80W of heat?

    Or is some energy transformed into “information”

    I completely forgot the question. If you reach the same state in the cpu as before, then you have just spend a lot of energy changing other states around it in a pattern. Each bit flip in the cpu is influencing everything else by either waves or radiation, so a bit flip will be exposed by heat generation or other ‘noise’ from that source. All of that combined state changes in the energy input, in the processing, and the influences delivered to its environment as different forms of radiation, puts out new information entropy in the universe projected from all the processing happening. It doesn’t matter if you keep a copy of the result or not, the universe KNOWS that you spend 80W/H watching fap-movies, and playing endless DK64 speedruns instead of donating cpu to save the world ! (just saying ;), but it IS a reason for concern in hw security !) ).

    I would assume that if you leave a single bit on, then the 80W transformed a local bit to a high nano-watt entropy state, and maybe triggered you to wonder why only one bit survived all that work.