[Solved] Why do computers generate heat? (2023)

thermodynamics friction information computer

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  isarandi about 2 years

  Computers generate heat when they work. Is it a result of information processing or friction (resistance)? Are these just different ways to describe the same thing? Or does some definite part of the heat "come from each explanation"?

  I often read that it's a necessary byproduct of information processing. There are irreversible operations such as AND gates and the remaining information goes to heat.

  But so many other things generate heat as well! A light bulb, electric hotplates, gears, etc. (These probably don't process information the way the computer does, but I may be wrong from a physical perspective.) Earlier I had always assumed the computer is like this as well. It basically has small wires in the processor and the resistance could explain the heat.

  Maybe these are parallel explanations. The information processing aspect may say that there has to be some heat as byproduct in some way in any realization of an abstract computer, and the friction aspect could then describe how this actually happens in this concrete wires-and-transistors-type physical implementation of the abstract computer.

  But maybe the two explanations account for separate amounts of the heat. Or maybe one accounts for a subset of the other, again in a partially parallel explanation way.

  Can someone clarify?

  See Also

  Why Do Computers Get Hot? | Phoenixite

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    hyportnex about 8 years

    Most of the heat in modern digital (CMOS) chips are generated by charging and discharging stray and intentional capacitors, the faster the chip is the more dissipative cycles it goes through per unit time. The heat dissipation is of course is in the unavoidable resistances.

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    Qmechanic about 8 years

    If you like this question you may also enjoy reading this post.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  Is the small heat explained by Landauer a subset of the resistance-heat, or is it additional?

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  lemon about 8 years

  @isarandi The Landauer principle says nothing about the mechanisms by which the heat is produced so it doesn't really make sense to say that 'this bit of thermal energy is Landauer and the rest is not', it is merely a theoretical limit.

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  Vincent Vancalbergh about 8 years

  So, short answer is what you mentioned, it's mostly the resistance-heat.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  Most computation is not reversible. For example zeroing out a chunk of memory. And programs are full of such value-setting operations.

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  CuriousOne about 8 years

  Please see what I wrote: computation can be made reversible, reset can not be. There is no need to reset memory during a computation. That's just a convenient (but unnecessary) operation to save memory.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  But in practice we do so. My question was about why computers generate heat in real life. You said the heat has nothing to do with Landauer because theoretically we can compute things reversibly. But this isn't a solid argument. What we actually do (reset memory often) may lead to heat through Landauer's principle.

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  CuriousOne about 8 years

  In practice the Landauer limit is nowhere close to the heat generated by practical computer designs. It is unmeasurably small for any mainstream memory design that I am aware of. I think it has been demonstrated, at least theoretically for some single bit atomic systems, but I could be wrong. At this point in time there is, as Feynman said, still plenty of room at the bottom, even for classical computing.

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  R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE about 8 years

  @CuriousOne: There most definitely is a need to "reset" (or rather reuse) memory during computation: otherwise you would quickly run out. That's why nobody implements the trivial allocator: malloc=sbrk and free=nop. On a more abstract level, in a general setting without knowing the particular computation you'll be performing, it requires astronomically more memory to make a computation reversible - and that memory has energy cost.

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  CuriousOne about 8 years

  Depends on what you are computing. Good algorithms compute in place whenever possible. You are right, though, reversibility will blow up the necessary memory requirement exponentially for NP algorithms... but that's basically saying that I can either compute reversibly and push the cost to the reset once, or be irreversible and reset as I go... the result is the same, and still some 10+ orders of magnitude below today's energy consumption. There ain't no free lunch.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  So let's make this clear. Assume we make a very-very efficient computer. Say we are extremely close to Landauer's bound. That heat will still come about through some concrete physical process, such as resistance, right? Or does it just magically jump from information to heat? Is that a physical interaction? As I understand it, it always involves some process that we can describe in non-information terms, too. Could you clarify?

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  lemon about 8 years

  @isarandi Yes, there will always be a 'concrete physical process' by which the heat is produced. There's no magic involved.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  Sure, but there is no additional heat associated with the information processing itself, it's always explainable by some good old well-known electrical phenomenon, like resistance. There is no separate "information-to-heat" physical process. At least that's what I understood from the other answers.

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  isarandi about 8 years

  @lemon I was using magic as a figure of speech. What I mean is that there is no 'concrete physical process' called 'information-to-heat interaction' or anything like that, right? All of the Landauer heat is realized by some good old well-known electrical phenomenon, like resistance, if I understand correctly. No additional heat because of (explainable solely by) information processing.

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