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Space hardware needs to be fundamentally different from surface hardware. I don't mean it in the usual radiation hardenrining etc, but in using computing substr
by noosphr 11mo ago
Space hardware needs to be fundamentally different from surface hardware. I don't mean it in the usual radiation hardenrining etc, but in using computing substrates that run over 1000c and never shut down. T^4 cooling means that you have a hell of a time keeping things cool, but keeping hot things from melting completely is much easier.
- baq 11mo agoif you have a compute substrate at 1300K you don't have a cooling problem - you have an everything else problem
- noosphr 11mo agoThere are very high temperature transistors. We don't use them on earth because we expect humans to be near computers and keeping anything extremely hot is a waste of energy. But an autonomous space data center has no reason to be kept even remotely human habitable.
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo agoThe transistors are experimental, and no one is building high-performance chips out of them. You can't just scale current silicon nodes to some other substrate. Even if you could, there's a huge difference between managing the temperature of a single transistor, managing temps on a wafer, and managing temps in a block of servers running close to the melting point of copper.