5 ms·
Maglev trains, fusion power plants, fanless super computers in your pocket that charge in a minute and don't get hot. Basically utopia.
by bhaak 3y ago
Maglev trains, fusion power plants, fanless super computers in your pocket that charge in a minute and don't get hot.
Basically utopia.
- DrBazza 3y agoMaybe it will be the thing that gives the US a nudge towards building a high speed train network. Commodity maglev would be generational leap over existing high speed rail. It would be an economic driver for the US, and take a lot of planes out of the sky, and even freight off the roads.
- rcpt 3y agoUltra efficient super fast maglev trains between our most important cities? Not in MY backyard!
- bick_nyers 3y agoYou want to bury a power cable connecting my city to a solar farm in the Sahara desert? Not in MY backyard!
- zardo 3y agoOh you say it's made out of lead, well in that case could you run my drinking water through it?
- psychoslave 3y agoWhile these are all cool applications, I can perfectly see them used in the most awful dystopian world imaginable.
- autoexec 3y agoI can't remember the last time a new technology became widely available that wasn't somehow used against us. There's always a catch. New products are often designed to work on behalf of people other than the "owner", and often are designed to prevent the "owner" from being able to do what they want with the product.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- l33t233372 3y agoI don’t understand how superconductors will make phones into supercomputers. There is a still the limitation of the number of transistors in a given volume. Also, how does this help fusion become possible?
- yetihehe 3y ago> I don’t understand how superconductors will make phones into supercomputers. Currently transistors and connections use a lot of power just to transfer some bits, superconducting wires and maybe transistors would help. > Also, how does this help fusion become possible? Stronger magnets which you don't need to cool with liquid helium will help achieve better plasma confinement.
- l33t233372 3y agoThat’s really interesting. It seems like this technology could be huge
- p1mrx 3y agoWe've already passed the point where superconductors need liquid helium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor "The most probable candidate material is yttrium barium copper oxide, with a design temperature of 20 K, allowing various coolants (e.g. liquid hydrogen, liquid neon, or helium gas) instead of the much more complicated liquid helium refrigeration chosen by ITER."
- kickopotomus 3y agoSuperconductors may reduce power consumption but they don't do anything to improve transistor density.
- spaethnl 3y agoBefore the node-size race we also had the clock-speed race. Eventually it was common for processors reach 2-4ghz, and after that the clock speed gains stopped being practical because as you increase clock speed you also increase energy requirements and heat. I think the implication is that clock-speed could start increasing again. It would probably require a completely new manufacturing process, but if we assume this superconductor is legit, perhaps an older process could manufacture it. If so, maybe we could have (just spitballing here, I have no idea) 28nm super conducting CPUs that run at a 1thz instead of 4ghz. That would be quite an improvement over today's CPUs, even with fewer transistors, I think. There are other losses and limitation in increasing clock-speeds aside from just resistive losses, but I think they are a significant part of the current bottleneck. Other losses involve transistor switching losses, and inductive losses but I don't really know the details, and I think those details change with superconductors.