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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

At this point transistors can't get much smaller without quantum interference, and quantum computers are intrinsically worse performing for most applications. Tbh many applications make poor use of multicore computers; further advancements will be on the software side with better concurrency.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yeah I saw an article a few weeks ago that they'd finally made an atom-sized transistor. Like 1 atom.

Hard to get much smaller than that.... Sub-atomic transistors may not even be possible, who knows? Unless a new technology like optical transistors comes along, then I'd wager it's nearing the end of the road.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The transistor in question was a quantum transistor; at such small scales you can't ignore quantum effects. The important bit was that it's room-temperature, which is important for practical quantum computing.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Right, but I don't think these are qbit transistors, they're just regular binary transistors. We've been dealing with quantum effects in electronics since the 90s. Usually trying to overcome them through good design so they're not a factor, which is probably a huge challenge with a transistor that's only 1 atom large. Quantum transistors for processing qbits rather than binary have a completely different design in my understanding.