Zero Power Computing

https://phys.org/news/2019-11-efficient-magnetic.html

Years ago the NSA made one of their usual proclamations to the semi-conducting industry, officially informing them that if their chips don't become dramatically more efficient, exoscale computers will cook themselves. Electronics are just the wrong way to go for a lot of technology, but developing the alternatives has required a great deal of time and effort. This one uses spintronics, relying on magnetic domains containing quantum vortexes that spin forever, which are the basis of how every hard drive works and a few other things, but have not come anywhere near close to meeting their full potential.

Engineers constantly complain that it makes no sense they have to account for the electron holes moving around on their chips, without the electrons, so little magnetic vortices that never die aren't as novel as you might think, but they are analog logic like a pinball machine and figuring out how to design circuits has been challenging to say the least. Their next goal is to design a circuit that does something useful such as crunching fast fourier transforms, but whether these chips will ever replace silicon is debatable. Although they use virtually zero power to crunch the numbers, there are plenty of other alternatives that do so as well, and the industry is always looking for that magic bullet like silicon, that does it all dirt cheap.

What's interesting about this particular advance, is that it could be integrated in some way with our current computers by clever engineers. These circuits work so much faster than what we use now there's no comparison, so they could be ideal for things such as input and output which are usually more analog to begin with.