this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Better batteries, yeah. That's down the line. We will also generate heat during the actual use of any devices. But, less.
It also could become the most efficient commercial batteries, but I expect the cost will be prohibitive. Sending electricity always has a loss, but it doesn't through a superconductor, so these will have a lot of uses at power generation sites, both reducing heat and losslessly storing it (until it enters the traditional grid).
It won't directly transfer to faster tech or anything like that, but it helping quantum computing could do so indirectly.
Definitely it's more of a facilitating research kinda thing. You can't play with superconductors in a lab in a cost efficient way, but this could let you.
Also maglevs and MRI's directly use superconductors currently, so that's a direct use, lower cost MRI's and incredibly fast trains.
Heat is a huge barrier to increasing clock speeds, so a room temperature and pressure superconductor would actually fairly directly translate to major performance gains in computing.
While true, that'd only be for a superconducting CPU. I doubt this material can both superconduct and act as a transistor, and even if it can, I highly doubt you could pack in anywhere near the amount we have in standard CPUs. So while we might replace a standard power supply with a superconducting one, and reduce heat that way, I don't see any direct computing boosts from this. We could superconduct everything around a CPU, have superconducting wires, but the heat from a CPU is generated in the silicon.
It'll be pretty nice to have 100% efficient PSUs, though. Definitely some gains there, just not the same revolutionary ones seen elsewhere.
This is where my mind went. Wondered if the reduction in heat would allow further overclocking/defaults on both CPU and GPUs. I don't know that much about the actual hardware and how it works though.
Not really. First, standard equipment is limited by cost, not technology. Nothing stopping some power user from using liquid nitrogen to cool a desktop, it's just costly. Superconductor tech, though, would be bleeding edge, it wouldn't cost any less for a long time. Supercomputing, on the other hand, has had access to more esoteric cooling systems, and can already use them. They also have had access to the extreme cold superconductors that have already existed.
The real issue there is the CPU makes the heat, but this tech isn't a transistor. We can't replace the silicon chips with superconducting ones, at least not in a form dense enough to be a CPU. There's lots of small improvements around the CPU we can make, but those aren't at the "wow, this will revolutionize technology" level. They're cool but it's the other stuff that's gonna get the focus.
Managing heat is a large part of circuit design. Superconductors can fundamentally change everything about it meaning far smaller much faster and more capable in every way. As an example 95%+ of modern CPU's and GPUs are cooling related. The actual chips are tiny in comparison to the whole component.
Got it. So it'll eventually lead to develop or improve daily stuff. I hope this material becomes a reality.