The thermodynamics of quasi-deterministic digital computers

Abstract

It is now well established that there is no lower bound for the energy dissipated during a computation. The relevance of the zero-energy limit is unclear, however, because it entails computations that are unreliable or infinitely slow, or both. In contrast the thermodynamic costs of deterministic computations that complete in finite time is less well understood. We propose a model of universal computation based on Markovian stochastic processes. While strictly deterministic computation is not possible in such systems, we show that the scaling of the energy consumption in relation to the accuracy of the computation is benign. This enables quasi-deterministic computation at modest cost in energy and completing within finite time.