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New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#71

Post by akiselev »

carlmr wrote: post #56
xvedejas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely that the more efficient our processors become, the larger share of the world's energy we'll devote to them [0]. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, if we're getting more than proportionally more utility out of the processors, but I worry about that too [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

>Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, if we're getting more than proportionally more utility out of the processors The trend seems to be that we get only a little bit of extra utility out of a lot of extra hardware performance. When the developer upgrades their PC it's easier for them to not notice performance issues. This creates the situation where every few years you need to buy a new PC to do the things you a…

Is that the case for our highly centralized clouds? No one's putting a liquid nitrogen cooled desktop in their office so this type of hardware would be owned by companies who are financially incentivized to drive down the overhead costs of commoditized functionality like networking, data replication and storage, etc. leaving just inefficient developer logic which I assume is high value enough to justify it.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#72

Post by emayljames »

fastball wrote: post #51
sliken wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't imagine why it would, but the lack of heat makes a 3D cpu much more feasible. So you could take 20 die, make 20 layers, and get radically more transistors per volume.

Seems like it would be much harder to keep a stacked CPU superconducting as heat dissipation would be more difficult.

Could a design with gaps between layers, but still connected as one not mitigate that though?.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#73

Post by valine »

VanillaCafe wrote: post #42

If it ever gets to home computing, it will get to data center computing far sooner. What does a world look like where data center computing is roughly 100x cheaper than home computing?

Not much would change I imagine. For most tasks consumers care about low latency trumps raw compute power.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#75

Post by jessriedel »

whatshisface wrote: post #44
jessriedel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but the fact that heat absorption scales with the surface area is pretty brutal for tiny cooled objects.

Heat conduction also scales with thermal conductivity, which is another thing that advances in solid state can bring us.

This doesn't change the fact that, for any degree of heat conductivity achieved smaller packages will be hard to keep cold than large ones.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#76

Post by jessriedel »

Calloutman wrote: post #46
jessriedel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but the fact that heat absorption scales with the surface area is pretty brutal for tiny cooled objects.

Not really. You just have the whole package instead a vacuum casing.

Really. Vacuum casing is not even close to sufficient to set heat absorption to zero because of thermal radiation.

And you can't just make the walls reflective once the cold object gets smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. The colder the object, the longer that wavelength.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#77

Post by gameswithgo »

xwdv wrote: post #59
b0rsuk wrote: post #10

Given the cooling requirements, I suppose it would create completely impassable rift between datacenter computing and other kinds. Imagine how programming and operating systems might look in a world where processing power is 80x cheaper. Considering that "data centers alone consume 2% of world's enegy", I think it's worth it.

As processing power cheapens, programmers will settle for lazy and inefficient code for everyday consumer applications. It will be easier to be a programmer, because you can get away with writing shitty code. So wages will fall and the prestige of being a software developer wanes. The jobs requiring truly elite skill and understanding will dwindle and face fierce competition for their high pay. Before this happens, I…

did you write this in 1980?

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#78

Post by root-z »

akiselev wrote: post #71
carlmr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, if we're getting more than proportionally more utility out of the processors The trend seems to be that we get only a little bit of extra utility out of a lot of extra hardware performance. When the developer upgrades their PC it's easier for them to not notice performance issues. This creates the situation where every few years you need to buy a new PC to do the things you a…

Is that the case for our highly centralized clouds? No one's putting a liquid nitrogen cooled desktop in their office so this type of hardware would be owned by companies who are financially incentivized to drive down the overhead costs of commoditized functionality like networking, data replication and storage, etc. leaving just inefficient developer logic which I assume is high value enough to justify it.

It's quite common in the cloud industry to trade hardware for shorter development cycle these days too. I think that's because there is still very high growth in the sector and companies all want to be the first offering feature X. As cloud services become more mature I expect people will be more cost sensitive. Though when that will happen I cannot say.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#79

Post by no_flags »

xwdv wrote: post #59
b0rsuk wrote: post #10

Given the cooling requirements, I suppose it would create completely impassable rift between datacenter computing and other kinds. Imagine how programming and operating systems might look in a world where processing power is 80x cheaper. Considering that "data centers alone consume 2% of world's enegy", I think it's worth it.

As processing power cheapens, programmers will settle for lazy and inefficient code for everyday consumer applications. It will be easier to be a programmer, because you can get away with writing shitty code. So wages will fall and the prestige of being a software developer wanes. The jobs requiring truly elite skill and understanding will dwindle and face fierce competition for their high pay. Before this happens, I…

Processing power has cheapened exponentially for the last 50 years (Moore's law). I am skeptical that a continuation of this trend will drive a fall in wages.

In my own experience performance optimization is an important but infrequent part of my job. There are other skills an elite programmer brings to the table like the ability to build a mental model of a complex system and reason about it. If downward pressure on wages occurs I think it will be for another reason.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#80

Post by Enginerrrd »

freeqaz wrote: post #32
the8472 wrote: post #18

> We use a logic primitive called the adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP), which has a switching energy of 1.4 zJ per JJ when driven by a four-phase 5-GHz sinusoidal ac-clockat 4.2 K. The landauer limit at 4.2K is 4.019×10^-23 J (joules). So this is only a factor of 38x away from the landauer limit.

Mind expanding on this a bit more? What is that that limit and how does it relate to the clock speed?

It's not about clock speed per se. It's about the lowest possible energy expenditure to erase one bit of information (or irreversibly destroy it by performing a logical operation). The principle comes about from reasoning about entropy loss in said situations. There's a hypothesized fundamental connection between information and entropy manifest in physical law. The idea is that if you destroy one possible state of a system, you have reduced the entropy of that system, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics implies that you must increase the entropy of the universe somewhere else by at least that amount. This can be used to say how much energy the process must take as soon as you choose a particular temperature.

This applies to any irreversible computation.

IMO, The fact that it's only 38x the minimum is MIND BLOWING.

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