Can nanomaterials revolutionize supercomputing?

[Phred101.2]

There has been a recent "breakthrough" in nanomaterials:

http://www.physorg.com/news112289877.html

This appears to be about scaling metallic "wires" down to nano-size. Such wires behave in a non-classical way and this may lead to much higher densities of switches and other devices etc. in chips. The page has links to other nanowire articles...

 

[Dr Transport]

I remember one of my professors years ago giving a seminar on his calculation of the behavior of metallic wires as the cross-section is reduced. If memory serves me correctly they became superconducting at room temp.

I'd love to have a hand-held supercomputer, the fun stuff I'd work on.

 

[mgb_phys]

You already have one.
The first supercomputer I worked on ran at around 200MFlops - about the same as the CPU in playstation 3 and 1/10 the speed of the GPU in the same console.