11–20 of 100 posts
Another notch on the belt for a cryocooler boom. Oh “superconducting is hard”, “if only we had high temperature superconductors”. All valid, but if we work with what we got and disrupt cyrocoolers make them a commodity like magnetrons all those laments become moot. Prove me wrong.
Is the cost of cryocoolong capex or Opex dominated?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So someone else needs to prove a negative, that there exists no possible technology that will "disrupt" cryocoolers by bringing them to an unspecified price/performance point by an unspecified time in the future to service an unspecified computing use-case? That seems more than a little unfair. :p
> someone else needs to prove a negative, that there exists no possible technology that will "disrupt" cryocoolers Look at the Wikipedia references for crycoolers [1]. Note the dates and volume. Now look at room-tempuerature superconductors [2]. 1990 vs 2023. 5 vs 57. OP is arguing that a greater fraction of high-temperature superconducting research dollars might find purchase in improving the cryocooler than we pres…
As a tangent: Don't forget to look at pressures too. Some newer superconductors that are near-room-temperature aren't quite as exciting when it turns out that requires over 1.5 million times normal atmospheric pressure. ("Hey, I think I over-tightened the CPU heatsink...")
I thought that there was a law of information theory that requires expending energy, I think it's Landauer's principle. It seems to be disputed though.
: The research group in Japan sought to create a superconductor microprocessor that’s adiabatic, meaning that, in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process. I thought that there was a law of information theory that requires expending energy, I think it's Landauer's principle. It seems to be disputed though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
: The research group in Japan sought to create a superconductor microprocessor that’s adiabatic, meaning that, in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process. I thought that there was a law of information theory that requires expending energy, I think it's Landauer's principle. It seems to be disputed though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
I’m guessing the efficiency gains can be considerable before hitting this limit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would running a cryocooler spend more energy than a superconducting CPU / GPU would save?
>The 2.5 GHz prototype uses 80 times less energy than its semiconductor counterpart, even accounting for cooling It's in the header of the article.
: The research group in Japan sought to create a superconductor microprocessor that’s adiabatic, meaning that, in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process. I thought that there was a law of information theory that requires expending energy, I think it's Landauer's principle. It seems to be disputed though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
If the superconducting microprocessor is 80x as efficient as a normal micro, that means that it uses about 100 million times as much energy as Landauer's principle. (A normal micro uses a billion times as much, and Landauer's energy is ~1/5th at superconducting temperature).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the superconducting microprocessor is 80x as efficient as a normal micro, that means that it uses about 100 million times as much energy as Landauer's principle. (A normal micro uses a billion times as much, and Landauer's energy is ~1/5th at superconducting temperature).
Yes, but the quote suggests no energy transfer at all. All you need then is a cold place (somewhere in remote space perhaps, or after the heat death of the Universe) and your computation can continue forever without power. It doesn't seem intuitive that that would be possible.
Most likely this headline is a confusion from how signal/power transmission (rather than calculation/work) is truly lossless in superconductors.
: The research group in Japan sought to create a superconductor microprocessor that’s adiabatic, meaning that, in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process. I thought that there was a law of information theory that requires expending energy, I think it's Landauer's principle. It seems to be disputed though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the cost of cryocoolong capex or Opex dominated?
Are you referring to the hardware cost vs operating cost? Or how the units are financed?