[postmortembees]

What if your PC did not need cooling, because it generated no heat? How much more potent could computers be?

[mitthrowaway2]

It probably wouldn't greatly affect the heat generation in a PC, unless the transistors could themselves be replaced with some superconducting alternative. Harnessing the efficiency from that would probably require that the computer be designed as a reversible computer. It would be its own research avenue.

[sudosysgen]

Unfortunately, as soon as you actually use the result of the computation in any kind of practical manner as an output, you break reversibility, though you could make the heat production happen away from the computation.

[sudosysgen]

Computation inherently generates heat, but if you could make chips that release negligible amounts of heat, you would unlock the third dimension which would help with reducing signal length and enable computers to be significantly faster.

[tills13]

That this as a solution applicable to _personal_ computing is a bonus. The real benefit is in datacenters which could be made smaller, more efficient, and cheaper while simultaneously adding capacity.