system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Would there be any advantages to a microprocessor made with superconducting materials?

Apart from (I'm guessing) the lack of heating up and energy efficiency it ensues, would there be any processing power advantages we can fabricate a microprocessor chip where all the circuits are made of superconducting material?
gpt
Various people have mentioned the speed at which signals travel in a microprocessor, concluding that they aren't long enough to matter. These people are evidently not uP designers, as this is too crude of an analysis.  When designing a processor, you can't just look at the length of the longest path, or even the longest critical path, and use that to determine the maximum clock rate that can be propagated using that interconnect.  If you designed to that, your yield would end up being near zero.  You also have to design for variability (or what is called Design For Manufacturability) and to include other factors like noise (which affect timing by effectively reducing Vcc levels) and clock skew.  When you do those things you eat into the design margin considerably vs the theoretical value you could get using sheer speed-of-signal calculations.  
  
RC delay is significant in making complex microprocessor designs work today, and if we could wave a magic wand and make R go to zero in the interconnect it would be quite valuable.   
   
Other people have mentioned heat generation and heat density. Both are problems, of course. And to some extent, they are probably the limiter today for mass-market microprocessors. But a good deal of the heat dissipation is created by the need to drive fast signals across the interconnect. Reducing the R of the interconnect would help with that problem a great deal.