4 ms·
This is pretty huge. The last major break thru was getting superconductivity in Y1B2C3O at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-200 C) back in the 1980s. I worked i
by MCRed 11y ago
This is pretty huge. The last major break thru was getting superconductivity in Y1B2C3O at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-200 C) back in the 1980s. I worked in a lab with the discoverer of this phenomena, Dr. Paul Chu.
While -70 is still damn cold, it should be achievable a lot more cheaply than having to cool things with LN2, so hopefully-- cross our fingers-- this will lead to the breakout of superconductivity into broad industrial use (and maybe the mainstream consumer market) that people have sought for decades.
BTW- while in that lab I used a variation of the meissner effect to design a memory circuit that was theoretically buildable at the time- static RAM that was superconducting. (and basically, the essentials of a transistor were there so logic gates could be built from super conductors, that was the thought experiment I was doing.)
Since heat is a major concern in CPUs, the ability to be superconducting (and thus producing no heat) would be a huge boon for computation. Of course initially this wold be at scales much larger than current lithography and thus only for specialized applications. But who knows.
With effort the cost of keeping a CPU at -70 should come down dramatically the way battery capacity per dollar has... or dare we hope the way flash density has.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago> Since heat is a major concern in CPUs, the ability to be superconducting (and thus producing no heat) would be a huge boon for computation. But (if the superconducting transistors worked like current CMOS, which is a big if): While there would be no power draw or heat dissipation at steady-state, there would still be some when gates switched, correct? And if so, you could still wind up with pretty significant heat dissipation...
- maaku 11y agoReversible computing...
- ant6n 11y agoI thought most of the heat nowadays is created by leakage. The rest by the semiconductor. Not sure how a superconductor would help here.
- XorNot 11y agoSQUID devices can be made switchable by the presence of an applied magnetic field, if I recall correctly. So you could build your superconducting computer entirely out of superconducting components.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- contravariant 11y agoWell in theory you should be able to keep it at that pressure without spending any additional energy. Not sure if that is practically feasible though.
- abduhl 11y agoYour math is incorrect. This is a common mistake. Tonnes is not a unit of force although many laymen believe it is. 90 GPa is 90x10^9 Pa which is 90x10^9 N/m^2 90x10^9 N/m^2 x 1m^2/1^6mm^2 = 90x10^3 N/mm^2 90x10^3 N/mm^2 is the equivalent to weight of 9,174 kg at sea level (9x10^10 / 9.81 = 9.17x10^9 kg/m^2) which is equivalent to 9.174 tonnes per square millimeter. As an aside, to make this more relatable: 90GPa is equivalent to ~3x10^7 feet worth of water pressure or roughly 5700 miles.
- meatysnapper 11y agoWe software "engineers" would still find ways to write shitty software to totally negate the benefits. "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh"