>From Intels website: "The term 'thermal management' refers to two major elements: a heatsink properly mounted to the processor, and effective airflow through the system chassis. The ultimate goal of thermal management is to keep the processor at or below its maximum operating temperature."
Robert Rosen defines programmable machines as images or models of nonprogrammable matter. Logical depth, developed by Charles Bennett at IBM, is a standard measure of information in network administration, digital security, and other fields. It measures the complexity of outputs - of whatever sort: numbers, images, etc. - qua underlying algorithmic processes. Bennett proposes depth as a "formal measure of value." In the background is a notion adapted from Turings theory of computation, which takes the complexity of algorithmic output and the noncompressibility of algorithms as models of complexity in general. Complexity is value. "The value of a message thus appears to reside not in its information (its absolutely unpredictable parts), nor in its obvious redundancy (verbatim repetitions, unequal digit frequencies), but rather what might be called its buried redundancy - parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation." The outer limit of logical depth, however, is physical complexity. Despite the physical Church-Turing thesis, which posits that we can model all entities algorithmically, physical hardware proves to be incomputable. Instead, it is the non-programmability of this physical dimension that enables the spaces and images of computability. This physicality is an absolute depth and the basis against which value is measured, copyrighted and marketed. By contrast, reversible computing or thermodynamic computing asks whether the energy dissipation in running a computer ultimately balances out with the computation produced. The simplest operation of AND or OR, even at the assembler level, involves destruction of information and expenditure of energy. Copying data would seem to increase information and deleting data to reduce it, but this is not the case. The computation involved in deletion still necessarily expends energy. So, tallying up the balance becomes complex. Following Landauers Principle, if computation were shown not to expend energy, the result would be a time-reversible process, a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, and the triumph of the digital over the analog. Computation would be a net gain, the super-production of immaterial, timeless, and virtual information. It turns out not to be the case, despite the near reversibility of todays processors and despite evidence for reversibility at the quantum level. Before there is digital simulation, there must be flow. The mere need to power the computer, to flow electricity into the material shell that simulates the digital space, establishes the energy spent and the non-reversibility of computation. My laptop is scarred and stained and chipped. Its solidity is a trap for time. I touch the screen. The cool surface is a non-revsersible gradient of energy dissipation. Boron, arsenic, phosphorus, antimony: these dopants are impurities added to a semiconductor lattice to alters its electrical properties. The resulting shift in the Fermi level of the semiconductor makes the semiconductor into a storage medium. Trace radionuclides generated from the ceramic packaging used as the substrate in computer chips can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably. For non Top Secret information, NISPOM prescribes overwriting data in 3 passes: with a character, then its complement, and finally with a random character; e.g., overwrite first with 0000 0000, followed by 1111 1111, then 1001 0111. Gutmann suggests overwriting data in 35 passes (or any number of passes) will not necessarily make it harder for laboratories, using a type of scanning electron microscopes say, to recover data from magnetic storage media. He also suggests that the methods that the DoD actually use are different to those that they recommend themselves, in order to make it easier for them to retrieve data from the hard-drive of a member of the public, should they wish to do so. The DoD also recommends deguassing the storage medium with a permanent magnet to saturate it with a unidirectional field. Certain magnetic remnance persists. There is no "zeroisation." My laptop is the peak of a wave.
