Silicon meets serendipity: Normal Computing thermodynamic computing ASIC

Normal Computing chips embrace noise, not suppress it.

August 18, 2025

David Harold

Normal Computing has taped-out the CN101—the world’s first thermodynamic computing ASIC. Designed to harness physical noise for probabilistic workloads, the chip promises up to 1,000× energy efficiency improvements for targeted AI and scientific tasks. While this represents a major milestone, scaling the approach to large models and integrating it into existing compute stacks will be a long-term challenge. Normal Computing has announced the successful tape-out of the CN101, its first thermodynamic computing chip and, it claims, the first of its kind in the world. Based on the company’s Carnot architecture, CN101 turns the traditional view of noise in computing on

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Silicon meets serendipity: Normal Computing thermodynamic computing ASIC

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