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Silicon is not valuable because it is a good conductor, in fact it is actually more like an insulator in its natural state. However, mixing the right materials
by sigmoid10 3y ago
Silicon is not valuable because it is a good conductor, in fact it is actually more like an insulator in its natural state. However, mixing the right materials into it, it becomes a very good semiconductor. So it can let current flow easily or block it effectively, making it a good basis for transistors. The problem here are the normal (usually copper) wires between transistors that cause heat to build up whenever current flows through them. That limits how densely you can pack wires in a chip. With a superconductor, we could not just have much smaller and much faster processors, we could also have many designs that don't require cooling anymore. Imagine a power monster chip like the RTX 4090 running state of the art LLMs locally on your phone. That's the kind of stuff that's at stake here and that's also why everyone and their uncle wants to be author on the original paper.
- evouga 3y agoHow much of the cooling cost of current chips is due to wires, vs. the transistors themselves? Superconductors will not help with the latter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __alexs 3y ago> The problem here are the normal (usually copper) wires between transistors that cause heat to build up whenever current flows through them. IIRC with the high frequencies of modern processors switching losses tend to be a larger factor than resistive losses. If you can remove the resistive losses that leaves you with a greater heat budget from switching losses which might help drive up frequency even more.
- sigmoid10 3y agoSwitch losses are also resistance losses, they just get amplified by things like the skin effect.
- __alexs 3y agoIf you have a room temperature superconductor, does that mean you can make a superconducting transistor from it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- visarga 3y agoDynamic current does not flow freely in superconductors, only direct current. So it would help for power circuits, not for data lanes.