When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another.
But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those annoying delays.
The key is to sit back and let a virus — the biological kind — handle the assembly work.
IonQ was founded on a gamble that ‘trapped ion quantum’ computing could outperform the silicon-based quantum computers that Google and others are building. As of right now, it does. IonQ has constructed a quantum computer that can perform calculations on a 79-qubit array, beating the previous king Google’s efforts by 7 qubits.
Their error rates are also the best in the business, with their single-qubit error rate at 99.97% while the nearest competitors are around the 99.5 mark, and a two-qubit error rate of 99.3% when most competitors are beneath 95%. But how does it compare to regular computers?
According to IonQ, in the kinds of workloads that quantum computers are being built for, it’s already overtaking them. The Bernstein-Vazirani Algorithm, a benchmark IonQ is hoping will take off, tests a computer’s ability to determine a single encoded number (called an oracle) when the computer can only ask a single yes/no question.
A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture.
Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti are developing new kinds of computer processors that rely on the mathematics of subatomic particles to potentially perform calculations difficult for classical computers to do. These devices use superconductors as the basis for their qubits. A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.
Whether we will ever find a way to overcome the physiological trade offs that hold back immortality, or whether we will really be able to replicate human consciousness in a computer are questions too difficult for us yet to answer. But are those leading the charge against death at least inspiring us to lead healthy lives, or are they simply rallying against an inevitable fate?
Long read: How nature is fighting our attempts to use biohacking to live forever.
This video is the tenth in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing what cloud computing is and the fundamental change it brings in how we view and think about computing.
[0:27–2:19] Starting off we’ll discuss, the revolution the cloud computing paradigm, computing as a utility, brings to the field of computing, and similar transformations seen when electricity became a utility.
[2:19–5:24] Following that we’ll discuss, what exactly cloud computing is and the types of cloud computing: Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), Platform As A Service (PaaS) and Software As A Service (SaaS) further extending to serverless architecture, Functions As A Service (FaaS).
At Intel’s recent Architecture Day, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president of Core and Visual Computing, outlined a strategic shift for the company’s design and engineering model. This shift combines a series of foundational building blocks that leverage a world-class portfolio of technologies and intellectual property (IP) within the company.
Architecture Day Fact Sheet: New Intel Architectures and Technologies Target Expanded Market Opportunities
This approach is designed to allow Intel to drive an accelerated pace of innovation and leadership, and will be anchored across six strategic pillars:
IonQ just made a presentation on two new trapped ion quantum computers with 160 stored and 79 processing qubits. This is more qubits than the best noisy superconducting quantum computers which is currently the Google 72 Qubit Bristlecone processor.
* IonQ systems are at room temperature
* IonQ manipulates ions with magnets and lasers and have software control on mostly FPGA chips.
