What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?
They're trying to build them with existing superconductors instead, but those require super cold temperatures or super high pressure.
This is (maybe!) a superconductor that's cheap and exists at normal temperature and pressure.
It's got some deficiencies that would prevent it from being used in a fusion reactor, but it's existence may teach us how to build a better one that will work.
> In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sputtering, and thermal evaporation, e-beam evaporation, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD), etc. are also included without limitation as long as the raw material can be deposited.
Listed methods are those used in semiconductor manufacturing to introduce materials to the wafers. It is also significant that the company's marketing material describes its resistance as "1/10^4 less than copper", because copper is currently used as a conductor in chips. (It wasn't always so, it used to be aluminium, which is a fascinating story itself. Read more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects.)
You see the same thing with external signals, like a connection between CPU and memory. Operate the bus at 1MHz and it is effectively DC. The signal has a wavelength of 300 meters, so when the signal travels a distance literally two orders of magnitude smaller across your motherboard the AC behavior is negligible. Operate that same bus at 1GHz and your wavelength is down to 30cm. Got a 40cm-wide motherboard? Better treat it like a transmission line or it isn't going to work!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-amplitude_modulation
The reason for this multiphase design is because it offers better power efficiency and better transient response to the CPU as the CPU moves between it's different power states (high vs low load).
[1]: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva882b/slva882b.pdf?ts=169087951...
Power consumption due to R in metal stack is not a large proportion of total. There could be bigger opportunity in reducing wire delay though.
So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up. Or a flying car. Or power cables that lose nothing during travel.
Naturally that’s why it doesn’t make sense. It’s too game-breaking to be possible in normal conditions.
Glitching something out by making it basically maximum cold makes sense because you’re making it fully still so that it stops messing with the current. Glitching something out by squeezing it until it can’t move makes sense. Leaving it in a normal room means it would have to be something completely crazy.
It doesn't work like that. Non-reversible computations necessarily produce heat. The superconducting wires will not heat, but the CPU will.
I touched on this in a previous thread[1], but superconductors only stay superconducting below not just a critical temperature, but also below a critical current density and critical magnetic field strength.
These limits are different for different superconductors. It could very well be this superconductor has really high critical temperature but really low critical current density, in which case you can't have lots of current at zero resistance.
That doesn't make sense. Power has to be consumed by something. All energy ends up as heat, so if the computer isn't heating up then the power consumption is 0W, not 1000GW.
>Or a flying car.
A flying car with superconducting motors would still have to expend the energy to stay aloft by pushing air downwards. Even without thermal losses to electrical resistance, you'd still have losses to friction from the moving components.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/flow-graphs/electricity...
It's not a piece of cake, but it's not a wild idea either. Adding a pair of LK-99 lines alongside each existing undersea optical line potentially gets you there by just increasing the maintenance budget. Lossless power transmission could change a lot of previously fundamental assumptions.
Probably all materials are superconductors at some crazy pressure/temperature.