Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics of Computation: Landauer's Principle and LLM Inference
Thermodynamics of Computation: Landauer’s Principle and LLM Inference
v1.2 | 2026-07-30 | Status: Peer-review ready
Landauer’s Principle
Statement: The erasure of one bit of information in a computational process must generate at least kT ln(2) heat, where k is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the temperature of the system.
Significance: This establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energy cost of computation. Information and entropy are deeply connected.
Calculation: At room temperature (300K):