96
China Just Made the World's Fastest Transistor and It Is Not Made of Silicon
(www.zmescience.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
96 points (100.0% liked)
technology
23730 readers
322 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"But turning laboratory breakthroughs into commercial chips typically takes years — sometimes decades"
2 years ago: China is 10 years behind on semiconductor technology!!!
1 year ago: China is 2 years behind on semiconductor technology!!!
6 months ago: China is 1 year behind on semiconductor technology!!!
Now: China's new transistor invention will take 10 years to commercialize!!!
While still a valid callout, these "new chips made out of non-silicon are BETTER in EVERY WAY!" experiments happen about once every 6 months. As it turns out, 10% less energy use isn't compelling enough to convince a trillion dollar industry to completely retool from the ground up, and even without the profit motive that's unlikely to change much.
I'm no expert, but if it works I can definitely see a use for 40% faster speeds in things like AI server farms and military applications. It's not like they need to roll it out to every phone and dishwasher in the world.
10% less energy is also a bigger deal than it sounds. Heat dissipation is basically the bottleneck of modern processors. That's why we've shifted to more cores instead.
Speak for yourself, my dishwasher can only play Doom 2016. No rest until it can crush Eternal at 144hz high graphics