Both brains and current semiconductor chips are built on dissipative/irreversible wire signaling, and are mostly interconnect by volume
That’s exactly what I meant. Thin wires inside a large amount of insulation is sub optimal.
When using better wire materials, rather than reduce capacitance per unit length, interconnect density can be increased (more wires per unit area) and then the entire design compacted. Higher capacitance per wire unit length than the alternative but much shorter wires leading to overall lower switching energy.
This is why chips and brains are “mostly interconnect by volume” because building them any other way is counterproductive.
The scenario I outlined while sub optimal shows that in white matter there’s an OOM to be gained even in the case where wire length cannot be decreased (EG:trying to further fold the grey matter locally in the already very folded cortical surface.) In cases where white matter interconnect density was limiting and further compaction is possible you could cut wire length for more energy/power savings and that is the better design choice.
It sure looks like that could be possible in the above image. There’s a lot of white matter in the middle and another level of even coarser folding could be used to take advantage of interconnect density increases.
Really though increasing both white and grey matter density until you run up against hard limits on shrinking the logic elements (synapses) would be best.
Brain interconnect already approaches the landauer limit for irreversible signalling, so changing out materials makes no difference unless you can also shrink the volume to reduce lengths, but as discussed in the section on density & temperature, the brain is also density bound based on the limits of heat transfer to the surface of the skin as a radiator.
That’s exactly what I meant. Thin wires inside a large amount of insulation is sub optimal.
When using better wire materials, rather than reduce capacitance per unit length, interconnect density can be increased (more wires per unit area) and then the entire design compacted. Higher capacitance per wire unit length than the alternative but much shorter wires leading to overall lower switching energy.
This is why chips and brains are “mostly interconnect by volume” because building them any other way is counterproductive.
The scenario I outlined while sub optimal shows that in white matter there’s an OOM to be gained even in the case where wire length cannot be decreased (EG:trying to further fold the grey matter locally in the already very folded cortical surface.) In cases where white matter interconnect density was limiting and further compaction is possible you could cut wire length for more energy/power savings and that is the better design choice.
It sure looks like that could be possible in the above image. There’s a lot of white matter in the middle and another level of even coarser folding could be used to take advantage of interconnect density increases.
Really though increasing both white and grey matter density until you run up against hard limits on shrinking the logic elements (synapses) would be best.
Brain interconnect already approaches the landauer limit for irreversible signalling, so changing out materials makes no difference unless you can also shrink the volume to reduce lengths, but as discussed in the section on density & temperature, the brain is also density bound based on the limits of heat transfer to the surface of the skin as a radiator.