this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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This is where my mind went. Wondered if the reduction in heat would allow further overclocking/defaults on both CPU and GPUs. I don't know that much about the actual hardware and how it works though.
Not really. First, standard equipment is limited by cost, not technology. Nothing stopping some power user from using liquid nitrogen to cool a desktop, it's just costly. Superconductor tech, though, would be bleeding edge, it wouldn't cost any less for a long time. Supercomputing, on the other hand, has had access to more esoteric cooling systems, and can already use them. They also have had access to the extreme cold superconductors that have already existed.
The real issue there is the CPU makes the heat, but this tech isn't a transistor. We can't replace the silicon chips with superconducting ones, at least not in a form dense enough to be a CPU. There's lots of small improvements around the CPU we can make, but those aren't at the "wow, this will revolutionize technology" level. They're cool but it's the other stuff that's gonna get the focus.
Managing heat is a large part of circuit design. Superconductors can fundamentally change everything about it meaning far smaller much faster and more capable in every way. As an example 95%+ of modern CPU's and GPUs are cooling related. The actual chips are tiny in comparison to the whole component.