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Would a superconducting material...

Raskolnikov said:
...working at room temperature totally eliminate the need for cooling in a pc?
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Probably not, unless you could find some other way of ensuring that the rest of the components wouldn't get too hot.

First, much -- most, even -- of a computer can't be made out of superconductors. The transistors, for example, have to be made of semiconductors, almost by definition. Similarly, the capacitors and inductors (if there are any) can't be made of superconductive material, and a superconductive resistor is, well, pointless. You could make the bus wires -- or anything else that just transfers signals from point A to point B -- out of superconductive material, but that's a fairly small part of the total computer. And if the transistors did get too hot, they'd still burn up.

Second, of course, is that even under normal operating conditions, the transistors tend to get a lot hotter than room temperature, which in turn means that the adjacent semiconductors would be a lot hotter than room temperature. So we'd need superconductors with a critical temperature much higher than room temperature -- or we'd still need cooling.
 
Raskolnikov said:
...working at room temperature totally eliminate the need for cooling in a pc?
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No. Virtually all of the heat generated is on the chips, which won't be replaced by superconductors anytime soon. Furthermore all the resistors can't be superconductors by definition, so those will always produce heat.
 
drkitten said:
a superconductive resistor is, well, pointless
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Barely related thought: I just realized that when calling jumper wires "zero-ohm resistors" it becomes absurd to assign a tolerance value as the traditional percentage.
 
Meffy said:
Barely related thought: I just realized that when calling jumper wires "zero-ohm resistors" it becomes absurd to assign a tolerance value as the traditional percentage.
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Hadn't thought of it that way before, but you are of course correct.
 
First time I saw this topic, I thought it said something about "superconducting meal." Now I just know that someone, somewhere is advertising their zero electric resistance diets as health food.
 
Meffy said:
Barely related thought: I just realized that when calling jumper wires "zero-ohm resistors" it becomes absurd to assign a tolerance value as the traditional percentage.
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No joke.

Are jumper wires really called 'zero-ohm resistors'? In which community, EEs?
 
Joke, feeble. EEs or techs with not a lot to do, mostly. :-)

[edit] Like "drowning worms" for "going fishing."
 
perfect conductors of heat. So you could use them as very good heat pipes to cool other components (assuming Tc was high enough).
 
drkitten said:
The transistors, for example, have to be made of semiconductors, almost by definition.
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[ur=http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/7/2/7]Nope, that's not true.[/url]

Superconductor transistors exist, based on something called a Josephson Junction.
 
Jimbo07 said:
No joke.

Are jumper wires really called 'zero-ohm resistors'? In which community, EEs?
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Yes, though they're rare now with multi-layer circuit boards and plated-through holes.

You use them because they can be inserted with the same machinery as they use to insert other components.
 
Wull dang, you're right. I forgot about those. My joshing was from an earlier time.
 
Terry said:
perfect conductors of heat. So you could use them as very good heat pipes to cool other components (assuming Tc was high enough).
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Would you mind saying what your source for that information is? I'm curious because the only place I've seen that was in a Niven novel, and Wikipedia's article on superconductivity suggests that superconductors do not have infinite thermal conductivity.
 
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