Symbol E_min
in is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
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Why this formula appears here
Every lineage discussed so far competes on how close it can get to doing more with less energy per operation. There is a hard floor beneath all of them, derived not from engineering but from statistical mechanics, and it is worth stating precisely because the rest of this section depends on it. In 1961, the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that any logically irreversible operation — one that destroys information, such as erasing a bit or overwriting one value with another without retaining a way to reconstruct the original — must dissipate a minimum amount of heat into its environment, because the entropy the erased information represented has to go somewhere, and the second law of…
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Symbol k_B
is an input to the expression that computes the quantity on the left.
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Read it with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
Research cited beside this formula
Published contexts (1)
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Equation 2 · Technological Evolution
After Moore: The Adaptive Radiation of Compute
This equation states an equality: the expressions on both sides have the same value under the article’s assumptions.
Every lineage discussed so far competes on how close it can get to doing more with less energy per operation. There is a hard floor beneath all of them, derived not from engineering but from statistical mechanics, and it is worth stating precisely because the rest of this section depends on it. In 1961, the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that any logically irreversible operation — one that destroys information, such as erasing a bit or overwriting one value with another without retaining a way to reconstruct the original — must dissipate a minimum amount of heat into its environment, because the entropy the erased information represented has to go somewhere, and the second law of…