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

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#131

Post by rini17 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:48 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.

Doubt if 80x difference would make it attractive. If it were 8000x then maybe.

And that only if you use the soil for cooling, which is non-renewable resource. If you use radiators, then you can put them on a satellite instead with much lower ping.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#132

Post by bananabreakfast » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #123

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone too lazy to math, its a car that can go: 28.4 million km per hour (i.e. 17.6 million miles per hour) I wonder how much that speeding ticket would cost. Disclaimer: Assuming the one-way speed of light is 300k km/s

No need to assume when we can define ;p

I think they were alluding to the fact that it is impossible to measure the one-way speed of light, and even the definition is an assumption based on the two-way speed

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#133

Post by ska » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #31

ska wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system as a whole will produce heat, but less.

True, but usually the problem is removing the heat from the chip, not the total amount of heat produced. If the heat is mostly produced by the cooling system then that problem all but goes away.

Not really at data centre scale. Heat directly in the CPU is a limiting factor on how fast an individual chip can go, and at the board level is an issue of getting heat away from the CPU somehow.

But that heat has to go somewhere. When you have rooms full of them the power and cooling issues become key in a way that doesn't matter when it's just a PC in your room.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#134

Post by faeyanpiraat » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

tromp wrote: post #125

This microprocessor composed of some 20k Josephson junctions appears to be pure computational logic. In practice it will need to interface to external memory in order to perform (more) useful work. Would there be any problems fashioning memory cells out of Josephson junctions, so that the power savings can carry over to the system as a whole?

If you compare cpu power usage with ram power usage, you'll see ram is already quite efficient, so even if traditional ram connected to the said microprocessor cannot be brought under the magic of this method, it might work.

(Haven't read the article, or have any expertise in this field, so I might be wrong)

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#135

Post by faeyanpiraat » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

gibbonsrcool wrote: post #124

fastball wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but since this 3D CPU would be superconducting, it would conduct electricity without resistance and therefore not generate any heat while in use.

Maybe there are parts which are not superconducting? Like impurities in the material. So even though the generated heat is like 0.01% of the original, some heat is still generated.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#136

Post by extropy » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #126

Calloutman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it works is that the entire assembly is in a vacuum. It kinda has to be as any gas which touches it will instantly condense to it or freeze to it. You then have a dual cryostat of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen cooling down the assembly (within the vacuum). The helium and nitrogen cryostat also have a vacuum shield. The nitrogen (liquid at 77K) is a sacraficial coolant which is far cheaper than liquid heli…

Great, then we both have physics PhDs, and you'll know that none of that equipment has, or easily could be, sufficiently miniaturized, which is the topic of discussion ("extremely small cryocooler"). You can't put nested closed dewers of liquid nitrogen and helium on a O(1 mm^2) microchip, and the reason is exactly what I said: it will warm up too fast.

What's wrong with attaching said microchip to a piece of copper for increased size? Genuinely curious.

To be useful in a data center you could cool a slab of copper the size of a fridge and surface mount thousands of chips on it.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#137

Post by layoutIfNeeded » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #109

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that many modern interfaces are somehow less responsive than ones written over 20 years ago even when running those programs on period hardware , I feel certain that you are right.

But it probably took 80x less time to develop said software.

I'd doubt that.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#138

Post by SirYandi » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #121

Sure. But how efficient are they once you include the power used to keep them cold enough to superconduct? I doubt that they're even as efficient as a normal microprocessor would be.

“But even when taking this cooling overhead into account,” says Ayala, “The AQFP is still about 80 times more energy-efficient when compared to the state-of-the-art semiconductor electronic device, [such as] 7-nm FinFET, available today.”

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#139

Post by adolph » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

Badfood wrote: post #39

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.

Cost / hash. If power is free they don't care about power

/ time. Time is immutable cost.

Re: New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency

#140

Post by _0ffh » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

philsnow wrote: post #102

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…

> The trend seems to be that we get only a little bit of extra utility out of a lot of extra hardware performance. "hardware giveth, and software taketh away"

Nice! Another (slightly more pessimistic) one is "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".