From the headline, I thought this was yet another attempt by some silicon valley bro to handwave furiously about everything being thermodynamics. Thankfully, this was not the case.
I'm kinda surprised nobody's done this before, given how important estimating wastage is.
The thermodynamic "limit" is pretty small compared to any other waste in a system (from Wikipedia):
> At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10^−21 J). Modern computers use about a billion times as much energy per operation.
The Landauer principle gives a lower bound for the energy needed for computation (specifically, irreversible information erasure). Is it possible that there is a heretofore undiscovered lower bound that is higher?
As an aside, modern computers perform computation like a car with square wheels --- in discrete steps, where all your energy is irreversibly discarded in each step. Theoretically, reversible computing [1] can do useful work with less energy without needing to erase information.
I'm kinda surprised nobody's done this before, given how important estimating wastage is.