New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency • Hacker News Board

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#81

Post by reasonabl_human » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #19

px43 wrote: post #11

It'll be interesting to see if the cryptocurrency mining industry will help subsidize this work, since their primary edge is power/performance. During stable price periods, the power/performance of cryptocurrency miners runs right up to the edge of profitability, so someone who can come in at 20% under that would have a SIGNIFICANT advantage.

In this paper, we study the use of superconducting technology to build an accelerator for SHA-256 engines commonly used in Bitcoin mining applications. We show that merely porting existing CMOS-based accelerator to superconducting technology provides 10.6X improvement in energy efficiency. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04641

Looks like the admit it’s not scalable and only applies to workloads that are compute heavy, but a 46x increase over cmos when redesigning with an eye for superconducting env optimizations

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#82

Post by akiselev » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #47

TOMDM wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant of the specific physics, but what if you got it cold before you sent it into a vacuum, and then shielded it from external radiation? Surely due to the massively reduced power usage it would be easier to keep it cool relative to traditional compute

The problem is that the act of computation is generating heat, so you can't just insulate your superconducting CPU, you need a way to dissipate the heat it must generate (this applies to all irreversible computations). This is difficult, because the only way to dissipate heat in space is radiation (with conduction usually acting as a middleman), which is constrained by the surface area of your radiator. So no, it pro…

Ideally this server farm would attach to a giant rock somewhere in a stable orbit and drill heat exchange pipes deep into the rock, like how we do for geothermal energy here on earth but in reverse. This whole exercise would require a nuclear reactor to be feasible both economically and engineering wise.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#83

Post by reasonabl_human » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #55

Nice, but requires 10 K temperature - not very practical. Once this can be done at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, that will be a true revolution. The difference in cost of producing liquid nitrogen and liquid helium is enormous. Alternatively, such servers could be theoretically stored in the permanently shaded craters of the lunar South Pole, but at the cost of massive ping.

I wouldn’t want to be on call when something breaks on the moon....

Astronaut DRIs?

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#84

Post by juancampa » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #55

Nice, but requires 10 K temperature - not very practical. Once this can be done at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, that will be a true revolution. The difference in cost of producing liquid nitrogen and liquid helium is enormous. Alternatively, such servers could be theoretically stored in the permanently shaded craters of the lunar South Pole, but at the cost of massive ping.

> The difference in cost of producing liquid nitrogen and liquid helium is enormous.

Quick google search yields: $3.50 for 1L of He vs $0.30 for 1L of H2. So roughly 10 times more expensive.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#85

Post by Enginerrrd » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

no_flags wrote: post #79

xwdv wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think in general you are right, however, there will certainly be sectors where it will be a lot easier to just throw it at a wall of computation than pay someone to think about it.

But architecting complex systems so that they are maintainable, scalable, and adaptable... there's not gonna be enough cheap computation to solve that problem and omit top talent for a long time.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#86

Post by reasonabl_human » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

jetrink wrote: post #57

benibela wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sundiver by David Brin they put all the heat in a laser, so they can beam it away from their craft

Is it possible to do this without violating the second law of thermodynamics?

I can’t think of a reason it would violate any basic physical laws. Use a peltier cooler in reverse as the transducer from heat to electricity, apply to an appropriately spec’d solid state laser. Surely the devil is in the details somewhere..

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#87

Post by gpm » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

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?

Flexible dumb terminals everywhere. But we already have this with things like google stadia. Fast internet becomes more important. Tricks like vs code remote extensions to do realtime rendering locally but bulk compute (compiling in the case) on the server become more common. I don't think any of this results in radical changes from current technology.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#88

Post by inglor_cz » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

juancampa wrote: post #84

inglor_cz wrote: post #55

Nice, but requires 10 K temperature - not very practical. Once this can be done at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, that will be a true revolution. The difference in cost of producing liquid nitrogen and liquid helium is enormous. Alternatively, such servers could be theoretically stored in the permanently shaded craters of the lunar South Pole, but at the cost of massive ping.

> The difference in cost of producing liquid nitrogen and liquid helium is enormous. Quick google search yields: $3.50 for 1L of He vs $0.30 for 1L of H2. So roughly 10 times more expensive.

Nitrogen is N2, though. Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than liquid hydrogen.

I was able to find "1 gallon of liquid nitrogen costs just $0.5 in the storage tank". That would be about $0.12 per 1L of N2.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#89

Post by sliken » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

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.

Presumably 80x less power including cooling means more than 80x less power not including cooling.

I'd think that should be enough to get quite a few layers, sure maybe some minimal space between layers for cooling, but radically less than the non-superconducting designs.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#90

Post by vlovich123 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

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…

I’m less pessimistic. Even if CPUs are 10x faster than they are, that still opens up more opportunities than what can be “absorbed” by less efficient coding/masses. There will always be demands for eking out more of the available processing/compute power and doing so will always be a difficult task. For example, today you can edit large scale videos in real-time and view various movie-quality SFX applied real-time on a consumer desktop. More computing power = more ability to do things cheaply that were in feasible/impossible before. You’re limited by your imagination more than anything.

What’s truly more of a threat is AI-aided programming if that ever becomes a thing. Again, I’m not worried. The gap between telling an AI “do something that makes me $1 billion dollars” and “write a function that has properties x/y/s” or “do this large refactor for me and we’ll work together on any ambiguous cases”, is enormous. So you’ll always have a job - you’ll just be able to do things you couldn’t in the past (it’s questionable whether an AI can be built that generates programs from vague/poorly defined specs from product or even that generates those specs in the first place.

As an obvious counter example to your theory, we have CPUs that are probably 10000x more powerful than in 1980 (actually more if you consider they have processing technologies that didn’t even exist back then like GPUs and SIMD). The software industry is far larger and devs make more individually.

Technically SIMDs and GPUs existed back then but in a much more immature form, being more powerful, cheaper and widespread today than what was available in the 80s.