437
Superconductor Breakthrough Findings Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing - Tom's Hardware
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
437 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59440 readers
3572 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I thought heat is the main thing limiting computer performance? Like, if we had superconducting transistors that take little energy to change state, highly parallel tasks that are power-limited today would get a whole lot faster. Think native 4k path tracing-level graphics in games on our phones. And better/faster/cheaper AI systems, though they are limited more by memory than by compute, so they'd likely still be run in the cloud mostly.
Heat is a big issue, but we are close to the physical limits of transistor size, they are nearly the size of atoms AFAIK. So this will allow us to have more of them closer I guess with no heat limits. There is also a lot of stuff that goes above my head about quantum tunneling when our transistors get that size. But transistors use semiconductors (Sillicon) not conductors, so this isn't a drop in replacement. Will require a new type of transistor that uses a conductor I suppose.