The Minimal Work Cost of Information Processing

Understand

Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost.

• This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing devices impedes the development of their performance.
• Here we determine the minimal work required to carry out any logical process, for instance a computation.
• It is given by the entropy of the discarded information conditional to the output of the computation.