Ask Science
Ask a science question, get a science answer.
Community Rules
Rule 1: Be respectful and inclusive.
Treat others with respect, and maintain a positive atmosphere.
Rule 2: No harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or trolling.
Avoid any form of harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or offensive behavior.
Rule 3: Engage in constructive discussions.
Contribute to meaningful and constructive discussions that enhance scientific understanding.
Rule 4: No AI-generated answers.
Strictly prohibit the use of AI-generated answers. Providing answers generated by AI systems is not allowed and may result in a ban.
Rule 5: Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
Adhere to community guidelines and comply with instructions given by moderators.
Rule 6: Use appropriate language and tone.
Communicate using suitable language and maintain a professional and respectful tone.
Rule 7: Report violations.
Report any violations of the community rules to the moderators for appropriate action.
Rule 8: Foster a continuous learning environment.
Encourage a continuous learning environment where members can share knowledge and engage in scientific discussions.
Rule 9: Source required for answers.
Provide credible sources for answers. Failure to include a source may result in the removal of the answer to ensure information reliability.
By adhering to these rules, we create a welcoming and informative environment where science-related questions receive accurate and credible answers. Thank you for your cooperation in making the Ask Science community a valuable resource for scientific knowledge.
We retain the discretion to modify the rules as we deem necessary.
view the rest of the comments
Information doesn't hold energy themselves, so yes the CPU produces 80W of heat, no matter what computation they do.
(Also it's pretty hard to define what's information, people generally talk about information entropy, which is different from thermodynamic entropy. This can be confusing).
But your instinct is correct, one cannot reduce entropy without spending energy. And the kind of computation computers do today does change entropy, so some energy must be dissipated as heat to do computation. This is the Landauer's principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
Also you need to remember that energy can not be destroyed or created. Expending energy to do something doesn't mean there will be less energy in the end.
Not sure why you think that? If information holds no energy then creating it without converting energy isn't against any physical laws.
There's also the idea of reversible computing where we could somehow get around the issue and lower the amount of heat generated. But I don't understand it well enough to explain further