84
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
84 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44133 readers
1012 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The potential for tech miniaturization alone is a massive deal.
Right now, one of the biggest obstacles toward packing more transistors into a given space is the fact that they radiate a shit ton of heat which must be removed by close to immediate contact with the heat sink.
Without the need to deal with a shit ton of waste heat, instead of only having one, or only a couple layers of transistors in a processor, you can stack that shit high. Volumetric processing. Instead of wider chips, we could have taller chips. Hell we could stop calling them chips, and start calling them blocks!
If our processors could be as dense vertically as they are horizontally, we would see entire orders of magnitude more processing power, and, because a lot of energy is not being lost to heat, it's actually being used productively. Or in other words, you need less energy and yet can accomplish even more work.
The overwhelming majority of the heat from processors is not from resistive power dissipation, it's from transistors switching state. This will not go away because of superconductors.
I read in another comment somewhere that introducing a superconductor wouldn't change the properties of the semiconductor bits. So the transistors themselves would still produce heat. But there are also full-conductor bits that produce heat that might be eliminated.