Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brutos 3439 days ago
Landauer's principle would come into effect if you had a theoretical "Computorium" material that could perfectly turn energy into computation. Then the computation you could produce per volume of space would be limited by it.

Our brains are (very) far from being the perfect computing material (so are our chips).

The theoretical minimum is only useful here to show that our brains cannot do free work. (Irreversible) computation always has a cost.

The 20 Watts are the important number. Our brains have a certain energy budget and have to perform within that constrain.