I appreciate you revising your reply to be less harsh, I wasn’t aiming to correct you on anything I was just offering some thoughts, I find this stuff interesting and like to chat about it. I’m sorry if I made your day worse, I hope things improve.
I said superconducting semiconductors as just a handy wavy way to refer to logic gates/transistors in general. I’m aware that those terms are mutually exclusive, but thats on me, I should have quoted to indicate it as a loose analogy or something.
The only thing I disagree with is your assessment that computation doesn’t create heat, it does. Albeit an entirely negligble amount, due to the fact that traditional computation involves deleting information, which necessarily causes an increase in entropy, heat is created. It’s called Landauer’s principle. It’s an extremely small proportion compared to resistive loss and the like, but it’s there none the less. You could pretty much deal with it by just absorbing the heat into a housing or something. We can of course, design architectures that don’t delete information but I’m reasonably confident we don’t have anything ready to go.
All I really meant to say is that while we can theoretically create superconducting classical computers, a room temperature superconductor would mostly still be used to replace current superconductors, removing the need for liquid helium or nitrogen cooling. Computing will take a long time to sort out, there’s a fair bit of ground to make up yet.
Okay, you’re kind of reaching with that one 😋 I didn’t mention Landauer’s Principle because it’s so negligible as to be irrelevant (seriously, the heat generated by writing or erasing a bit is about equivalent to the energy levels of a single electron in a hydrogen atom, in the range of ~0.018 eV at room temperature), and superconductors will reduce even that. I kind of wish we had another word, for when “negligible” doesn’t do the insignificance justice.
I do appreciate the clarification on the point of superconducting semiconductors - and the concern for my day haha! It really wasn’t anything to do with you, hence the edit. And, your point here is absolutely correct - LK-99 isn’t some magical material that can be all things to all people. Its other properties may make it unsuitable for use with existing hardware manufacturing techniques or in existing designs, and we may not find superconductors that can fill every role that semiconductors currently occupy.
Edit: lol, looks like its “other properties” include not being a fucking superconductor. Savage.
I think “rounding error” is probably the closest term I can think of. A quick back of the envelope estimation says erasing 1 byte at 1GHz will increase an average silicon wafer 1K° in ~10 years, that’s hilariously lower than I’m used to these things turning out to be, but I’m normally doing relativistic stuff so it’s not really fair to assume they’ll be even remotely similar.
I appreciate you revising your reply to be less harsh, I wasn’t aiming to correct you on anything I was just offering some thoughts, I find this stuff interesting and like to chat about it. I’m sorry if I made your day worse, I hope things improve.
I said superconducting semiconductors as just a handy wavy way to refer to logic gates/transistors in general. I’m aware that those terms are mutually exclusive, but thats on me, I should have quoted to indicate it as a loose analogy or something.
The only thing I disagree with is your assessment that computation doesn’t create heat, it does. Albeit an entirely negligble amount, due to the fact that traditional computation involves deleting information, which necessarily causes an increase in entropy, heat is created. It’s called Landauer’s principle. It’s an extremely small proportion compared to resistive loss and the like, but it’s there none the less. You could pretty much deal with it by just absorbing the heat into a housing or something. We can of course, design architectures that don’t delete information but I’m reasonably confident we don’t have anything ready to go.
All I really meant to say is that while we can theoretically create superconducting classical computers, a room temperature superconductor would mostly still be used to replace current superconductors, removing the need for liquid helium or nitrogen cooling. Computing will take a long time to sort out, there’s a fair bit of ground to make up yet.
Okay, you’re kind of reaching with that one 😋 I didn’t mention Landauer’s Principle because it’s so negligible as to be irrelevant (seriously, the heat generated by writing or erasing a bit is about equivalent to the energy levels of a single electron in a hydrogen atom, in the range of ~0.018 eV at room temperature), and superconductors will reduce even that. I kind of wish we had another word, for when “negligible” doesn’t do the insignificance justice.
I do appreciate the clarification on the point of superconducting semiconductors - and the concern for my day haha! It really wasn’t anything to do with you, hence the edit. And, your point here is absolutely correct - LK-99 isn’t some magical material that can be all things to all people. Its other properties may make it unsuitable for use with existing hardware manufacturing techniques or in existing designs, and we may not find superconductors that can fill every role that semiconductors currently occupy.
Edit: lol, looks like its “other properties” include not being a fucking superconductor. Savage.
I think “rounding error” is probably the closest term I can think of. A quick back of the envelope estimation says erasing 1 byte at 1GHz will increase an average silicon wafer 1K° in ~10 years, that’s hilariously lower than I’m used to these things turning out to be, but I’m normally doing relativistic stuff so it’s not really fair to assume they’ll be even remotely similar.