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justsid06/04/20252 repliesview on HN

Not to ruin a joke, but does it actually make a difference for SRAM? It’s two inverters in a loop, despite not being the same size they are active components. But I’m also a software guy so I could be totally wrong.


Replies

dskloet06/04/2025

I think displaying black or white pixels makes a bigger difference.

bdcs06/04/2025

> does it actually make a difference for SRAM?

I have no idea in practice. But for the thermodynamic limit of actually making a difference, any irreversible change requires heat to be generated, e.g. initializing to zero, truncating, or bitshifts with discarded information. In contrast, addition/subtraction/multiplication/bitshifts without over-/under- flow will not necessarily generate heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

PS. you can also use mass-energy equivalence to extend this to calculate the lower limit of mass for a given quantity of information. TL;DR: The internet weighs 50g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaUzu-iksi8