Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

New Approaches to Computing

There are a lot of radical ideas out there about how to make calculation much faster than it is today. We'll just mention a few.

Supercooling

Electrical circuits operate faster and more efficiently when they are cold—very cold, like 90° Kelvin (around −300° Fahrenheit). The biggest benefit of the CPU-in-the-deep-freeze is that it makes much higher clock speeds available. Unfortunately, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before your desktop will feature a really cool computer. One is that the technology currently needed to supercool electronics is both expensive and bulky. If that problem is solved, there is the fact that both the CPU and the circuitry that it connects to will have to be redesigned to operate successfully ...