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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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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.