3 ms·

> Much faster with no heat to burn your lap. Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.

jacquesm 3y ago
This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch. So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
westurner 3y ago
Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground) Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat. From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 : > "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h... >> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
mikro 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
richyliu 3y ago
Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all. [1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on-making-it-reversible https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...

jacquesm 3y ago

This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch. So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.

westurner 3y ago

Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground) Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat. From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 : > "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h... >> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)

mikro 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.

richyliu 3y ago

Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all. [1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on-making-it-reversible https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...