Quote:
Originally Posted by maximara
IIUC one of the issues Intel is having at going below 14 nm is heat and in space heat is a problem as the only option for cooling things off is radiation. The x86 architecture hasn't exactly been cool (I still remember the jokes about the Pentium space hear with the very first PC to use that chip)
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If your spaceship is one giant computer, sure. Otherwise, you can probably dump quite a bit of heat into the ship environs before it becomes an issue (particularly with a good cooling setup). I suspect the waste heat from your power plant sufficiently outstrips that of your onboard computers as to make the latter negligible to the ship as a whole. If this isn’t the case, and your vessel has insufficient radiators, you’ll probably have to temporarily reduce the power of your computers and/or other heat-generating systems from time to time.
All that said, I see nothing wrong with positing a hard-science future with weaker-than-expected computer technology. Even if you’re wrong, it’s unlikely to be the most important thing you “mess up,” because the future isn’t exactly easy to predict.