Recent events have reinforced the urgency of FLEET’s mission, with the dramatic rise of Bitcoin introducing the public to the notion that computing is a limited resource, and that the energy used in computation has become significant.
Bitcoin relies on the creation of new blocks in a blockchain, a computationally-intensive process by design. The profitable creation or “mining” of new blocks for the blockchain sparked a new industry, and that industry was quickly limited by the energy demands of the computationally intensive process, with some estimates putting the electricity consumption in Bitcoin mining as greater than that of Peru!
This was a small-scale demonstration of an unavoidable truth: the exponential demand for new computing capacity must be met with exponential gains in computing efficiency, or the information revolution will grind to a halt.
To date, that need for efficiency was largely satisfied by steady progress in conventional silicon computing technology – known as “Moore’s law”.
However, Moore’s law is slowly coming to an end – a process unfolding right now, with major indicators of computer-chip performance falling off track and ceasing to improve with time.
Thus FLEET’s mission to produce a new energy-efficient computing technology is of vital and timely importance.
The Centre for Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) brings together over a hundred Australian and international experts, with the shared mission to develop a new generation of ultra-low energy electronics.
The impetus behind such work is the increasing challenge of energy used in computation, which uses 5–8% of global electricity and is doubling every decade.
More information
- FLEET contact Errol Hunt media@FLEET.org.au
- Visit FLEET.org.au
- Follow @FLEETCentre
- Watch Future solutions to computation energy use
- Subscribe FLEET.org.au/news