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Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

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Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#91

Post by ForOldHack »

Jensson wrote: post #82
Grimblewald wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stuff like this makes me wonder what the distribution on human context limits is.

It is very small, but humans tend to internalize knowledge as they read giving essentially infinite but lossy context length. Those posters failed to internalize the message here so they get the wrong knowledge out of the message.

That was both self referential and ignorant of what? Oh. .. forgetting. Or the simulatianiety. Or not. I am stuck in a zero sum post, or not. A comma uses less energy than three dots,

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#92

Post by ForOldHack »

boznz wrote: post #23

Great, I can make my software even more shitty, and nobody will notice.

Is there a hard limit on ensh*tification? I was just posting about Yelp, and reddit from a cell phone, and the thought crossed my mind to just close mobile browsing forever.

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#93

Post by ForOldHack »

timschmidt wrote: post #77
actinium226 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically my question. I'm not clear on what all the transistors on a chip are doing and I'm trying to understand what the significance of a chip with only 5k transistors but able to do 2.5GHz would be. I imagine there must be some limitation, I'm just not sure what.

Most of the things modern microprocessors spend transistors on are clever bargains to allow the CPU to execute a single thread faster. Caches which store instructions and data closer than main memory, translation lookup buffers which store already de-referenced memory locations, pipelining which reduces the amount of work and complexity per stage so each can be clocked faster, SMT to make better use of multiple decod…

Are barrel shifters automatically zero sum? How often do GPUs do renormalization? It's the switching and the location information.

Did we have this discussion 50 years ago? It is a set of brilliant ideas. I read about jjs when I was small, and later re-read about why they never panned out significantly.

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#94

Post by [deleted] »

actinium226 wrote: post #76
mrguyorama wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very confused but I mean this in the utmost sincerity: What made you think transistor count and clock speed were linked? What was your line of thought? How did you think overclocking worked, by dynamically removing transistors from the chip?

That's basically my question. I'm not clear on what all the transistors on a chip are doing and I'm trying to understand what the significance of a chip with only 5k transistors but able to do 2.5GHz would be. I imagine there must be some limitation, I'm just not sure what.

[deleted]

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#95

Post by vlovich123 »

tcgv wrote: post #89
Animats wrote: post #88

4 bit CPU, about 10,000 gates, 5 GHz. So just a proof of concept at this point. Cyrogenic computing has been too far outside the mainstream. The mainstream technology improved faster than the cyrogenic stuff. NSA put large amounts of money into cyrogenic computing, from the 1960s on. "I want a thousand-megacycle computer. I'll get you the money!" - an NSA director. It never really worked out, although at one point so…

That's the way technology evolves, some bets pay off, while others don't.

Actually, it evolves in a random walk. Old ideas can become more practical because while we abandoned an approach, we got better at things that would make it more feasible another time around (eg VR today looks nothing like the VR of my childhood due to advances across the board in computing power, computer language expressivity, game dev tools, IMUs, IMU algorithms development, etc etc etc). That’s a case of a path opening up due to investment over time that couldn’t be accomplished by a bet.

Other times bets are insufficient in size - a bet that requires 100B to unlock trillions may seem like a failure at 10B, especially if you didn’t properly estimate the size of a market (or the market isn’t large enough for that yet).

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#96

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tliltocatl wrote: post #51
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is, cryocooler theory is pretty well established and "solved at this point, so there is no reason to expect something completely new phenomena there, just some engineering improvements. Solid-state physics, on the other hand, is just computationally infeasible to "solve", so there is a plenty of possibility to discover something unpredicted.

> cryocooler theory is pretty well established and "solved at this point

What are you quoting? What is "cryocooler theory"?

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#97

Post by coryrc »

Terr_ wrote: post #81
coryrc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter aren't being researched for CPUs, which are small things. They're for applications like long-distance power transmission, electric motors, and more. Things which aren't feasible to cryocool.

> long-distance power transmission IIRC unlikely to change quickly even with higher-temp superconductors, since it would mean splicing in new power-grid segments that transfer direct-current instead of alternating, and then you have losses in conversion too.

We have plenty of long-distance HVDC links, one of the most prominent being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T..., which also helped isolate Quebec from the Northeast blackout of 2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#98

Post by cashsterling »

written-beyond wrote: post #67
cashsterling wrote: post #64

I worked on a team (at a Company) that built a Scanning SQUID Microscope (SSM) to image magnetic flux trapping in superconducting circuits. The organization that bought the SSM is working on these kinds superconducting microprocessors. A SSM uses a SQUID (superconducting quantum inference device) as an extremely sensitive magnetic flux sensor; SQUID sensor requires further amplification which is also typically a SQUI…

I appreciate your comment it's probably very informative to a lot of people here on HN. I will admit this comment for me, read like something out of r/vxjunkies. Props to you and your team for building amazing stuff. Squid and Niobium are very entertaining names.

Thanks! Also, I made at least one bad typo. SQUID = Superconducting Quantum Interference Device... not inference.

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#99

Post by tliltocatl »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #96
tliltocatl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, cryocooler theory is pretty well established and "solved at this point, so there is no reason to expect something completely new phenomena there, just some engineering improvements. Solid-state physics, on the other hand, is just computationally infeasible to "solve", so there is a plenty of possibility to discover something unpredicted.

> cryocooler theory is pretty well established and "solved at this point What are you quoting? What is "cryocooler theory"?

Thermodynamics. Should have been "solved", missed the closing parenthesis.

Re: Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient (2021)

#100

Post by hn72774 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #20
hn72774 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the hardware cost vs operating cost? Or how the units are financed?

That's what it means. Some things are expensive to buy, some things are expensive to run, and some things are both.

The terms in that context are fixed cost vs variable cost.

CapEx vs OpEx deals with how the equipment is managed financially. Buy vs lease/rent/IAAS. Good examples here https://centersquaredc.com/blog/choosing-the-best-data-cente...

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