That post makes a fundamental error about wiring energy efficiency by ignoring the 8 OOM difference in electrical conductivity between neuron saltwater and copper. (0.5 S vs 50 MS)
There’s almost certainly a factor of 100 energy efficiency gains to be had by switching from saltwater to copper in the brain and reducing capacitance by thinning the wires. I’ll be leaving a comment soon but that had to be said.
energy/bit/(linear distance) agreement points to underlying principle of “if you’ve thinned the wires why haven’t you packed everything in tighter” leading to similar capacitance and therefore energy values/(linear distance)
face to face die stacking results suggest that computers could be much more efficient if they weren’t limited to 2d packing of logic elements. A second logic layer more than halved power consumption at the same performance and that’s with limited interconnect density between the two logic dies.
The Cu<-->saltwater conductivity difference leads to better utilisation of wiring capacitance to reduce thermal noise voltage at transistor gates. Concretely, there are more electrons able to effectively vote on the output voltage. For very short interconnects this matters less but long distance or high fanout nodes have lots of capacitance and low resistance wires make the voltage much more stable.
Electrical conduction through “Neuron saltwater” is not how neuronal interconnect works, its electrochemical. You are simply mistaken, as copper interconnect wire energy limits and neuron wire energy efficiency limits are essentially the same and both approach the theoretical landauer minimum as explained in the article.
edit: continued partially in the original article
That post makes a fundamental error about wiring energy efficiency by ignoring the 8 OOM difference in electrical conductivity between neuron saltwater and copper. (0.5 S vs 50 MS)
There’s almost certainly a factor of 100 energy efficiency gains to be had by switching from saltwater to copper in the brain and reducing capacitance by thinning the wires. I’ll be leaving a comment soon but that had to be said.
energy/bit/(linear distance) agreement points to underlying principle of “if you’ve thinned the wires why haven’t you packed everything in tighter” leading to similar capacitance and therefore energy values/(linear distance)
face to face die stacking results suggest that computers could be much more efficient if they weren’t limited to 2d packing of logic elements. A second logic layer more than halved power consumption at the same performance and that’s with limited interconnect density between the two logic dies.
The Cu<-->saltwater conductivity difference leads to better utilisation of wiring capacitance to reduce thermal noise voltage at transistor gates. Concretely, there are more electrons able to effectively vote on the output voltage. For very short interconnects this matters less but long distance or high fanout nodes have lots of capacitance and low resistance wires make the voltage much more stable.
Electrical conduction through “Neuron saltwater” is not how neuronal interconnect works, its electrochemical. You are simply mistaken, as copper interconnect wire energy limits and neuron wire energy efficiency limits are essentially the same and both approach the theoretical landauer minimum as explained in the article.