07-05-2015, 01:50 AM
You can do that, but I think there's no advantage in it.
The heat produced in reversible computing can be produced at a designated location by doing bit erasures at a distance removed from the computing. That said, it would introduce a speed-of-light roundtrip between the computation and the heat disposal, and that would slow the computation down at least twice as much as just using a superconductor conduit to _directly_ remove heat from the reversible computation site after (local) bit erasure. Ultimately, it would produce the same amount of heat if we get the same amount of reversible efficiency.
When conducting energy (electricity or heat - aka entropy or bits in this case) through a superconductor, the energy propagates at the speed of light. And the superconductor loses its superconductive property if heated above its critical point. That means there is too much energy contained within a given volume of the material. The volume centered at the point of energy input and bounded by the speed-of-light constraint and the superconductor's physical shape, must be large enough that its energy density doesn't exceed the critical point for its material.
So, as with any kind of energy transport, there's a lower bound on the space required to transmit it via superconductor. Probably not a relevant one on the scale of conventional engineering, but extreme engineering seems to be the order of the day here.
The heat produced in reversible computing can be produced at a designated location by doing bit erasures at a distance removed from the computing. That said, it would introduce a speed-of-light roundtrip between the computation and the heat disposal, and that would slow the computation down at least twice as much as just using a superconductor conduit to _directly_ remove heat from the reversible computation site after (local) bit erasure. Ultimately, it would produce the same amount of heat if we get the same amount of reversible efficiency.
When conducting energy (electricity or heat - aka entropy or bits in this case) through a superconductor, the energy propagates at the speed of light. And the superconductor loses its superconductive property if heated above its critical point. That means there is too much energy contained within a given volume of the material. The volume centered at the point of energy input and bounded by the speed-of-light constraint and the superconductor's physical shape, must be large enough that its energy density doesn't exceed the critical point for its material.
So, as with any kind of energy transport, there's a lower bound on the space required to transmit it via superconductor. Probably not a relevant one on the scale of conventional engineering, but extreme engineering seems to be the order of the day here.