Many orders of magnitude so. The last generations of vacuum tube processors were... | Hacker News

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		ben7799 on Aug 1, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetis... Many orders of magnitude so. The last generations of vacuum tube processors were the size of large multi-story office buildings and had 50k tubes. Compare to your smartphone, it would take billions of tubes to duplicate it.

Thetawaves on Aug 1, 2023 [–]

Later research into thermionic devices did produce miniaturized versions, but nothing close to the scale of silicon transistors today.

If the same R&D might went into thermionics, we might just have devices of similar scales.

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