Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hovering_nox | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hovering_nox

Here's a few from the top of my head:

- A global power net. No solar power during the night? Just produce it on the other side of the planet.

- A superconducting computer. Less resistance when pushing bits around = 500x less power consumption.

- A Superconducting magnetic battery. Store power indefinitely with high efficiency.

View on HN

Most power loss in a computer comes from MOSFETs, not resistive loss. Which isn't to say that RTP superconductors wouldn't open up wild new possibilities.

ETA: wrong

Much of the power consumed, and heat dissipated, by conventional processors comes from moving information between logic elements rather than the actual logic operations. Because superconductors have zero electrical resistance, little energy is required to move bits within the processor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing#Fund...

Incorrect.

https://www.ti.com/lit/an/scaa035b/scaa035b.pdf

This document explains it well. (The resistance of the interconnect is not even mentioned as a significant component of power consumption.)

You can synthesize superconducting FETs though: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-1918-4_...

Obviously this isn't much benefit since the vast majority of applications can't be liquid nitrogen cooled (and computing has followed "what consumers will buy" on progress).

That changes substantially if superconductors will keep working when put in my pocket.

That statement in Wikipedia is flat out wrong and notably isn't citing any source.

I don't think this is true. Most of the power is dissipated in the metal interconnect.

If yesterday's comments were correct, you can strike the power transport and storage use cases, as this material has a pretty low electric current density.

Not only less power consumption on Computers but a 100x improvement in clock speeds, a 500GHz CPU would be absolutely insane.

Whether or not we can manufacture/shrink the superconductor circuits enough to be competitive with semiconductors is another question, but my naive interpretation is that if you can make the superconductor circuits 100x larger than a silicon circuit, it is still going to have significant advantages.

> A global power net. No solar power during the night? Just produce it on the other side of the planet.

This sounds like it has interesting ramifications for global politics. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, one major lever the Russian government had was to enable blackouts in Ukraine. Makes you wonder how a global power network could work in light of international conflict.

Wouldn't less power loss not just mean lower power consumption, but the ability to run it at higher speeds while keeping the same cooling technology we current have?

Even faster. That is to say, even faster than a semiconductor CPU that didn't generate any heat whatsoever (or was cooled with liquid helium).

Assuming of course it is possible to shrink the superconductor circuits down to the same size of the semiconductor counterpart.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com