PAI-270 · Education

The Energy-First Turn: Computing as a Function of Energy

Electricity, not transistors, is now what schedules the next model. This course teaches you to price computing in joules and to tell an honest energy claim from a flattering one: where the joules actually go, why data movement rather than arithmetic is the bill, which substrates escape it, and what evidence would count as proof. You leave able to audit an efficiency claim rather than repeat it, and to tell a claim a cleverer algorithm can destroy from one it cannot.

Skilled → Frontier·4 modules · 5 labs·5 lessons
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Module 1

The bill and the floor

Physics permits a computer millions of times cheaper than the one we build. Find the floor, then find where the money actually goes — and discover that it is not the arithmetic.

  1. SkilledHow cheap is computing allowed to be?Compute the Landauer limit yourself and measure how far above it a real operation sits. The gap is the headroom the whole field is arguing about.→
  2. SkilledThe bill is data movement, not arithmeticBuild the energy ledger of a small workload and find out which side it is actually on. This is the fact that decides what a cheaper computer must look like.→
Module 2

Settle, don't shuttle

Meet the move that every serious escape route shares: treating computation as relaxation rather than as a sequence of fetches and multiplies.

  1. FrontierComputation as relaxationSolve the same problem twice — once by executing a fixed sequence, once by letting a system settle into a low-energy state — and compare what each one costs.→
Module 3

Measure it honestly

Learn the discipline that decides whether this paradigm survives: making a modelled number, a stand-in measurement and a metered one permanently distinguishable.

  1. FrontierThe receipt, and why grades never blendBuild an energy receipt that carries its own provenance, then compose several and watch the composite take the weakest grade rather than the average.→
Module 4

The bar a new machine must clear

Learn to tell a claim that a cleverer algorithm can destroy from one that it cannot, by doing the destroying yourself.

  1. FrontierDequantize an advantage yourself, then find the one that survivesBuild a speedup that looks like new-hardware magic, destroy it with a classical algorithm, and then measure the one advantage that no algorithm can take away.→