Comment by noosphr
2 days ago
Space hardware needs to be fundamentally different from surface hardware. I don't mean it in the usual radiation hardenrining etc, but in using computing substrates that run over 1000c and never shut down. T^4 cooling means that you have a hell of a time keeping things cool, but keeping hot things from melting completely is much easier.
if you have a compute substrate at 1300K you don't have a cooling problem - you have an everything else problem
There are very high temperature transistors.
We don't use them on earth because we expect humans to be near computers and keeping anything extremely hot is a waste of energy.
But an autonomous space data center has no reason to be kept even remotely human habitable.
The transistors are experimental, and no one is building high-performance chips out of them.
You can't just scale current silicon nodes to some other substrate.
Even if you could, there's a huge difference between managing the temperature of a single transistor, managing temps on a wafer, and managing temps in a block of servers running close to the melting point of copper.