Not so fast, just because something becomes available doesn't mean it will be immediately used for everything it _could_ be used for. Cost remains a factor.

I very much doubt room temperature superconductors would ever be used in consumer electronics. They probably wouldn't even be widely used in data centers outside of truly cutting edge "no expense spared" systems.

Sure but that's true for many (if not all) things that superconductors might (in theory) enable. I do think, though, that especially in computing there'd be enough economic incentive to use superconductors everywhere if the energy savings are substantial enough.

No heat means no power usage (unless we also find a way around the laws of thermodynamics), so no superconductors aren't going to make your laptop magically not heat up. It could help a bit with power lines going to transistors, but to do actual computions we need to consume power and thus generate heat.

You're right, I was being overly sloppy with my wording here. I was only referring to the uniform electric resistance part of energy losses that would be gone. My understanding had always been that the latters makes up a significant portion of the total energy CPUs consume because we're still many orders of magnitude away from the Landauer limit, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle .

To get there we wouldn't just need a superconductor, but a supersemiconductor that could switch instantly between infinite and zero resistance. I don't think we're anywhere near that, let alone one at room temperature.

From the top my head, most power is dissipated in switching, then leakage (for that we would actually need higher resistance in the transistors) and only then resistive losses in powerlines.

> From the top my head, most power is dissipated in switching, then leakage (for that we would actually need higher resistance in the transistors) and only then resistive losses in powerlines.

Interesting, I stand corrected then!

Most of that heat is generated in the silicon, not the wiring. Unless we discover a semiconducting superconductor with which to replace the silicon junctions, we'll still have plenty of heat dissipation in the CPU.