Absolutely fascinating BBC News article about the ultra-energy-efficient, ultra-tiny future of supercomputers (Thanks, Twitter friend @whatgreeninvest).

I found some bits especially startling: According to the IBM researcher leading the team,

“The cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.”

“In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs – to run a data centre will cost more than to build it.”

“It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives.”

Even the early protoype of the team’s water-cooled computer is half again as fast as today’s fastest supercomputers—but it’s larger than a refrigerator. Scientists want to shrink it to the size of a sugar cube!