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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're changing the underlying currents or resistances, you'll still have heat losses that need to go somewhere.

I don't think it's that a 700C chip doesn't need cooling the way a 90C chip does; it's that the delta between 700C and room temperature means that a much smaller and much more passive cooling apparatus may be sufficient.

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As radiative cooling is a temperature to the 4th power (T^4) process, vs. linear (T^1) for conductive and convective cooling, one could certainly increase power density for general electronics, though the danger of setting something on fire, and actually needing higher temperature packaging / soldering / bonding processes might put a crimp on that.

However, space craft would be where being able to run hotter would significantly reduce the size and complexity of cooling systems, as they can only use radiative cooling bleed off the heat they generate into space.

Besides the thermodynamic advantages with conduction / convection / radiation, you can also use boiling points. Strap a pan with water to it. The pan won't heat up past 100 unless all the water has boiled off. You still need to remove the same number of Watts, but this is potentially easier to manage.

Makes sense, though you can get that with contemporary automotive spec (120-150C) parts.

>The pan won't heat up past 100 unless all the water has boiled off

Imagine... a smart rice cooker where the heating element is its own embedded system running some kind of awful javascript-based OS and monitoring stack optimised for maximum waste heat. When the rice is done the system emails you and then issues itself an ACPI shutdown.

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