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Comment by nextaccountic | Hacker News Reader

> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.

Can't superconductor help here?

Only a little, one big limitation in chips is RC wire delays (the distributed capacitance along a wire needs to be charged/discharged for a signal change to pass) - due to edge effects capacitance doesn't scale with the area of the wire - but R does (inversely so wires have gotten slower) - so as chips have got denser wires have not got faster at the same rate, when I first started building chips we mostly only cared about gate capacitances - now RC delays are a big deal - if R went to 0 RC delays would too - things would get faster

I'm surprised anyone is even trying that hard to make faster CPUs anymore, now that they're already so fast. You'd think everything would be done by GPUs or dedicated accelerators by now. Especially when so much of the internet is pretty much just serving video files.

But yet there's still so much that could be accelerated even with current hardware, but isn't.

It's not obvious to me how it could. Transistors require a semiconductor.

To my knowledge, computers can be designed without any transistors

They can, but then you're talking about a totally different physical scale of computer. Transistors are useful because we know how to shrink them to a scale of nanometers, in particular we know exactly how to do that with transistors printed with lasers onto silicon chips. We'd have to reboot the CPU manufacturing industry with new base materials/technologies.

It's hyper-specialized tech, so it'd probably take over a decade from now to be seen in useful, everyday technologies.

Superconducting semiconductors? I doubt such a thing is possible.

Doubt no more. Its called a Josephson junction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect

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