Current (May 1995) revision of 1992 report. We consider limitations on the performance of computers arising from thermodynamics and the laws of physics. We provide upper bounds on three quantities: sustained information flux, information storage density, and sustained computational speed. All of these upper bounds are "tight " in the sense that they could be approached by plausible-sounding physical systems, and they all arise from a single unified point of view. We also make a conjecture about the rate of inevitable decay of stored information. This conjecture may be thought of as a quantitative extension of the second law of thermodynamics. It leads to a bound on the density of stable information. We carefully elucidate the assumptions behind these
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