this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
202 points (100.0% liked)

Science

12864 readers
319 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 13 points 11 months ago

So would this mean that cpus would not generate heat?

Not quite. Charges undergoing acceleration and state transitions still generate EM radiation, and still lose energy. In a semiconductor, charges start moving, stop moving, and change direction all the time. So that form of energy loss & heat generation will continue.

In addition, the semiconductor itself is still a semiconductor, not a superconductor. To take advantage of the ability of a semiconductor to hold charges in specific states, there will be some heat losses.

But, a practical superconductor could be used to form all the interconnects in a PC board or the surface of a silicon chip device, providing an efficiency improvement.