Items tagged with IBM
Quantum computing is the next big field of research that could topple how we use computers today. Now, IBM has proved and demonstrated that quantum computers have advantages over their classical counterparts. To understand what IBM has done, we must first grasp how quantum computing works today. As the blog post describes, computing can be viewed as circuitry, where at the start are a number of classical or quantum bits (qubits). These bits are set to a starting value and then traverse through the circuit, which imparts change on the bits through gates that depend on a user-written program. For example, to compute 1 + 1, you must start at 1, then go through a plus gate to increase the starting...
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We hate to be the bearers of more bad news regarding the global chip shortage, but there's now additional confirmation that the dark cloud looming over the industry will be here for an extended period. In a recent interview, IBM President Jim Whitehurst echoed the sentiments of both Intel and TSMC when it comes to addressing the insatiable need for microchips. "So frankly, we are looking at couple of years before we get enough incremental capacity online to alleviate all aspects of the chip shortage," Whitehurst explained. "We're going to have to look at reusing, extending the life of certain types of computing technologies, as well as accelerating investment in these fabs, to be able to as quickly...
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IBM is laying claim to the first chip manufactured on a 2-nanometer manufacturing node, calling it a breakthrough in semiconductor design. To put that into perspective, 2nm is smaller than the width of a single strand of human DNA. Meanwhile, the chip itself is about the size of a human fingernail and is crammed with 50 billion transistors. "The IBM innovation reflected in this new 2nm chip is essential to the entire semiconductor and IT industry," said Darío Gil, SVP and Director of IBM Research. "It is the product of IBM's approach of taking on hard tech challenges and a demonstration of how breakthroughs can result from sustained investments and a collaborative R&D ecosystem approach."...
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Last year's Overwatch League was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that temporarily pumped the brakes on some interesting AI projects, as well. At the time, Blizzard and IBM were set to announce that Big Blue was about to become the cloud, AI, and machine learning analytics partner for the game's official e-sports platform. Blizzard and IBM hope that this partnership will lead to figuring out new ways to evaluate performance, fix balance issues, and much more. Now that Overwatch League is back on for 2021, the partnership is starting to bear fruit. IBM has developed an AI-powered ranking system that will not only separate the wheat from the chaff, but hopefully also bring the best of...
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Somewhere between Babe and Elon Musk’s Neuralink experiments are pigs playing video games for science. Though it may sound bizarre, researchers Candace Croney and Sarah Boysen wanted to better understand the cognitive ability of pigs, through training and manipulating a joystick-operated video game task. This training and subsequent research has since led to some interesting results. Over the years, it has been found that pigs are relatively smart animals, and it has become something of common knowledge. While the humane treatment of farm animals in an effort to gauge intelligence may raise ethical concerns, this new research is simply interesting to dig into. For the experiment, the subjects...
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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, IBM created a global security task force, called X-Force, dedicated to threat intelligence and analysis for organizations that are part of the vaccine supply chain. The work the task force has put forth has apparently yielded success as the group just announced that it discovered a global phishing campaign targeting COVID-19 "cold chain" organizations. These cold chain orgs are reportedly a vital part of the COVID-19 supply chain as they ensure that vaccines are preserved in cold temperatures so they remain effective. According to IBM’s X-Force, the phishing campaign began in September of this year, spanning across six countries and several...
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It is rather rare to be able to peek behind the scenes for a look at how a state-sponsored threat group operates. However, a recent mistake has provided security researchers with information about the methods of the group referred to as “ITG18.” The security researchers discovered training videos that were accidentally uploaded by the Iranian hackers to an unprotected server. The video footage reveals some of the hackers’ techniques and their preferred targets. ITG18 is an Iranian state-sponsored threat group. They are also referred to as APT35 or Charming Kitten by other security researchers. The group uploaded more than 40 gigabytes of data onto an unprotected server back...
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The 55th edition of the Top500 supercomputers list was published, and a supercomputer from Japan has taken the top spot on the list. The supercomputer is called Fugaku, and it turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops beating the Summit supercomputer by a factor of 2.8 times to take the top spot. The Japanese supercomputer is powered by Fujitsu 48-core A64FX SoC and is the first machine to sit at the head of the Top500 supercomputer list that's powered by Arm processors. Fugaku delivered extreme performance in single or further reduced precision, which is a workload often used in machine learning and AI applications, with a peak performance of over 1000 petaflops. The...
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There's a good old fashioned nerd fight brewing between the eggheads at IBM and Google. Don't worry, it's not physical—it's a war of words and theoretical concepts. What sparked the debate is Google's claim of achieving "quantum supremacy" with Sycamore, a system outfitted with a 53-qubit processor and how it performs compared to a classical supercomputer in a specific task. Google conceived an experiment to demonstrate just how capable Sycamore is, noting it can complete a certain benchmark test in 200 seconds, whereas "a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task." The spunky Mountain View firm details the experiment in a blog...
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Earlier this morning, a seemingly improbable headline started making waves in the tech world. According to the report, Dr. Lisa Su was plotting an exit from her position as CEO of AMD in an effort to take the #2 spot at IBM. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su According to the original story, Su’s goal was to eventually ascend to become the CEO and President of IBM, where should would replace current chief Ginni Rometty. Also featured in the report was the assumption that recent AMD hire Rick Bergman – who previously served as CEO of Synaptics – would take over the CEO role following’s Su’s departure according to WCCFTech. Given how instrumental Su has been in turning around...
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Foldable devices seemed like the way of the future as manufacturers like Samsung and Huawei rushed to get them into production. The high profile failure of the Samsung Galaxy Fold seems to have put a damper on that rush, however. IBM has filed a patent for a wearable that can be a smartwatch, a smartphone, and a tablet with a display that stacks away when not needed. The multifold display isn't anything like what Samsung used in its Galaxy Fold device. Rather than being one continuous display, the IBM patent outlines a device that uses display tiles that stack into a smartwatch on the wrist and can be folded out into different configurations to give the user the screen size they want for the...
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IBM took its most recent AI system, dubbed Project Debater, and entered it into a competition against human debating champions. The event was held at the IBM Watson West site in San Francisco, California. Project Debater started by preparing arguments for and against the following statement: “We should subsidize space exploration.” The IBM AI and its human opponent, Noa Ovadia, each delivered a four-minute opening statement, four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute summary. IBM notes that Project Debater made an opening argument that supported the statement with facts including the benefits of space exploration for mankind. Ovadia opposed the statement arguing that there are better applications...
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NVIDIA and IBM have helped the United States lay claim to the fastest supercomputer ever made. Called Summit, the remarkable machine sits at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) where it is capable of crushing workloads via a staggering 200 petaflops of high-precision computation, making it eight times more powerful than Titan, previously the fastest supercomputer in the US. "Summit is fast, but what Summit means is even more remarkable," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at Summit’s debut. "Summit is a magnificent scientific instrument that will attract the world’s great scientists...Summit is a milestone in a global race. Not a race to space, but a race...
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In the early days of computing, fancy and powerful number crunching devices were incredibly large. Things have evolved since then, and we can now fit what are essentially PCs (smartphones) into our pockets, giving us access to much more powerful machinery in a portable form factor that would have been unheard of several decades ago. But why stop there? At the IBM Think 2018 conference, IBM unveiled the world's smallest computer, a blockchain system that is tinier than a grain of salt. The minuscule PC was born out of IBM Research. Each year the division showcases some of the biggest breakthroughs coming out of the company's labs as part of its annual "5 in 5" technology predictions. These consist...
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Quantum computing is often seen as the "holy grail" when it comes to the next logical progression in processing performance. Companies like Google and Intel are currently developing quantum computers, and industry stalwart IBM just announced today that it has produced a machine that is able to process 50 quantum bits (qubits). The machine is currently in the "operational prototype" stage, which means that it is still quite far off from commercial use. But, what exactly is a quantum computer? Our modern computers process ones and zeros, whereas quantum computers can represent ones, zeros or both (at the same time) as qubits commingle in entanglement and superposition states. This peculiarly...
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For fans of Lenovo's venerable ThinkPad business notebooks, the cat is out the bag with regards to its upcoming model to commemorate the brand's 25th anniversary. A German blog managed to capture images of the ThinkPad 25 in all its stealthy, charcoal-colored glory. The 3.48-pound ThinkPad 25 is reportedly based on Lenovo's existing ThinkPad T470, which means that it comes packing a 14-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920x1080. The machine is said to include an Intel Core i7-7500U processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 940MX (although we would have liked to have seen the Pascal-based GeForce MX150). On the connectivity front, the ThinkPad 25 incorporates...
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We've reported on a few occasions that Lenovo is working on a retro throwback laptop that channels some of the looks and cool features that ThinkPad fans of yore will remember fondly. Fast forward a couple months and an actual picture (not a render) has turned up out of China claiming to show the notebook in the flesh. The image certainly doesn't give up much in the way of detail, showing only the corner and logo, but it is claimed to be the retro anniversary ThinkPad. While the image has turned up in China, word is that the "ThinkPad 25" has also been found at a German certification site. Why is the retro ThinkPad a big deal? Back when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand the machines had quite...
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For mass storage duties, you can forget about mechanical hard drives, let alone solid state drives wielding NAND flash memory. After all these years, magnetic tape is still the capacity king. That is even more true now that IBM Research, located in Zurich, Switzerland, and Sony have managed to cram a whopping 330 terabytes of uncompressed data onto a single magnetic cartridge. The record breaking achievement was made possible by combining Sony's new magnetic tape technology and lubricant with mechanical parts and software from IBM, including newly developed write/read heads, advanced servo control technologies, and signal-processing algorithms. The end result is a recording density of 201 gigabits...
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In an era where high profile data breaches are becoming far too common, IBM has a solution that could help. The company on Monday unveiled IBM Z, a next generation mainframe that is is billing as the world's most powerful transaction system. Just as importantly, it offers pervasive encryption so that all data is encrypted all of the time, whether it is part of an application, cloud service, or chunks of bits in a database. "The vast majority of stolen or leaked data today is in the open and easy to use because encryption has been very difficult and expensive to do at scale," said Ross Mauri, General Manager, IBM Z. "We created a data protection engine for the cloud era to have a significant and...
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Mechanical keyboards are wildly popular among computing enthusiasts and gamers currently. However, hardcore and old school geeks alike will argue that the venerable IBM Model F, circa 1981 and sporting keys that must be forced down on internal buckling springs, was the best mechanical keyboard ever made. It was a key masher's dream and emanated a deliciously clicky sound that modern day mechanical keyboards have all tried and failed to perfectly replicate.Until very recently the Model F was a nearly extinct, rare beast, only found in retro graveyard revivals with keepers of the faith, or the lucky few with access to dinosaur, left-behind stockpiles from the big hair days of computing. That...
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With the Chinese dominating the charts when it comes to the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the United States is looking to leverage its homegrown talent to usher in next-generation exascale computing. The Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is funding six of the country’s top chip firms in order to ensure U.S. leadership in the field. Those companies include AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IBM and Cray. The six companies will have access to $258 million in funds that will be dispersed over a three-year-period. According to DOE, the funds will be used by the six companies to boost research and development in hardware technology, software technology...
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IBM has teamed up with semiconductor equipment suppliers and manufacturing bigwigs GlobalFoundries and Samsung to develop a new process for building silicon nanosheet transistors. This new process paves a path to 5-nanometer, with the subsequent "fingernail-sized" chips packing a staggering 30 billion transistors inside. Hooray for keeping Moore's Law intact. Image Source: Connie Zhou via IBM "This announcement is the latest example of the world-class research that continues to emerge from our groundbreaking public-private partnership in New York," said Gary Patton, CTO and Head of Worldwide R&D at GlobalFoundries. "As we make progress toward commercializing 7nm in 2018 at our Fab 8 manufacturing...
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