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Here’s the thing: The device you’re reading this article on kind of sucks.
No, it’s not because you don’t have the latest tech or software update. It’s because all computers are fairly inefficient—at least, traditional ones. When you strip a normal computer like your cell phone or laptop down to its most basic part, you get a transistor. This acts as a switch that controls the flow of electric volts that transmit data, known as bits. These bits are typically conceptualized as either zeros or ones, where zero is a low voltage and one is high. Combine transistors together, and you can relay even more complex data.
Transistors are tiny. For example, a transistor in Apple’s M1 chip is five nanometers. For comparison, a human red blood cell is roughly 7,000 nanometers wide, and a strand of DNA is 2.5 nanometers. In our chase to make electronics smaller and smaller, though, we’ll eventually hit a point where we simply can’t shrink transistors down any more. At extremely small sizes, the volts sent through to transmit data risk flowing through a transistor regardless if it’s open or closed—a process called quantum tunneling.
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