| HN Mirror

"Yes", but only extremely simple demo circuits.

Basically, they are hedging a bet on the following: When you perform a calculation, the electricity that went into the circuit only exits as the answer, anything else that didn't become the answer turns into waste heat and electromagnetic fields.... what if you reversed the calculation, and the only waste produced is transmission of the answer?

If you know anything about EE, you'd know that what I said is an extremely simple view of how modern ALUs are made, and ignores the past 40+ years of optimizations; however, they believe by "undoing" the optimization and "redoing" it as an entirely reversible operation not only will work, but will the final optimization we can make.

There will be no benchmarks of the kind you want, because that isn't the issue: I can take any CPU off the shelf today, and run it 10 times faster: it will melt because of self-generated heat, but for a glorious microsecond, it will be the fastest CPU on earth.

They are stating that they have potentially fixed one of the largest generators of waste heat, which would allow us, using all of our existing technology, to start ramping up our clockspeeds, and our true final frontier will be trace lengths at macroscale (which is already a problem at the clockspeeds we use for DDR5 and PCI-E 6).

However, given how Extropic's website says none of what I just said, they're probably just some startup trying to ride the AI wave, and then close shop in a few years. I doubt they've magically figured out one of the hardest problems in EE atm. They are also not the only company in this space, and every single major semiconductor company in the world is trying to solve it.