Hot New Thermodynamic Chips Could Trump Classical Computers

Quantum dead ends, tech-industry navel-gazing, an AI gold rush: All of these merged together in Verdon’s mind to inspire a new philosophy along with belief in a new engineering idea. In both conventional and quantum computers, heat is a source of errors. Both kinds of computing require huge expenditures of energy to prevent natural thermodynamic ef... See more

Verdon was not the only person who felt that a quantum bubble was losing air. “It looked like all these applications we really wanted to do weren’t going to work in the era of noisy quantum computing,” says Faris Sbahi, cofounder and CEO of a thermodynamic startup called Normal Computing. “I became a little negative on the prospects for commercial ... See more

he has also rejected quantum computing. “The story of thermodynamic computing is kind of an exodus from quantum,” Verdon says. “And I kind of started that.”

These components, Verdon promises, will be used to generate “programmable randomness”—a chip in which probabilities can be controlled to produce useful computations. When combined with a classical computer, he says, they will provide a highly efficient way to model uncertainty, a key task in all sorts of advanced computing, from modeling the weathe... See more

Not unlike its quantum cousin, thermodynamic computing promises to move beyond the binary constraints of 1s and 0s. But while quantum computing sets out—through extreme cryogenic cooling—to minimize the random thermodynamic fluctuations that occur in electronic components, this new paradigm aims to harness those very fluctuations.