Items tagged with (NYSE:IBM)
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 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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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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IBM is boldly going where no company has gone before. IBM just announced that Ubisoft’s Star Trek: Bridge Crew VR game will incorporate Watson's interactive speech and cognitive capabilities.IBM Chief Developer Advocate Willie Tejada, remarked, “For the first time, Watson will power the technology that makes it possible for gamers and fans of Star Trek to interact with the crew. We are only just seeing the impact of virtual and augmented reality and IBM is committed to providing developers with the tools they need to innovate and be competitive in this AI and Cognitive era.” Watson will allow players to give interactive voice commands to virtual members of Starfleet. They will also be able to...
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No other company is more active in securing patents in the United States than IBM. The company has led the charge each and every year for nearly the past two and a half decades and this year set the record for most patents in a single year with a total of 8,088 patents granted to its investors. Among them were over 2,700 cognitive and cloud computing patents, though the totality of it all covered a wide range of technologies, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and areas IBM identified as being strategic ones for future growth. IBM's record setting year breaks down to more than 22 patents being granted per day in 2016. No other company was in contention to beat IBM for the most...
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IBM has just made available to developers an experimental version of Project Intu, a system agnostic platform that allows for the integration of Watson capabilities into various end-user form factors. With Project Intu, developers can incorporate cognitive experiences into a variety of products and services, including avatars, robots, drones, and the growing Internet of Things (IoT) category, to name a few. One could view this as a step towards bringing machine learning into consumer devices and everyday products. Forget about today's crop of digital assistants like Siri and Cortana, Project Intu could lead to much more immersive experiences by enabling devices to interact in a more natural way...
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Have you ever forgotten to pick something up on your ride home, or wished for restaurant recommendations while cruising through a new city? Your car could potentially provide the solution to these problems and more through the use of artificial intelligence. General Motors and IBM have announced a partnership that will combine OnStar and IBM’s Watson to create OnStar Go, the first auto cognitive mobility platform. Phil Abram, Executive Director, GM Connected Products and Strategy, remarked, “On average, people in the U.S. spend more than 46 minutes per day in their car and are looking for ways to optimize their time. By leveraging OnStar’s connectivity and combining it with the power of Watson,...
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Quick, which is more expensive to own, a Windows PC or a Mac? Conventional wisdom (and not-so-fuzzy math) says Macs typically cost more than comparable Windows PCs, but if you look beyond the initial price and also factor in time and money spent maintaining each system, do things change? IBM's VP of Workplace as a Service Fletcher Previn came to the conclusion that Macs are by far the better buy after analyzing post-sales costs. While speaking at the Jampf Nation User Conference this week, Previn broke it down like this—the initial cost of purchasing a Mac system runs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC, but over a four-year span that follows, IBM saves between...
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We've been hearing about NVIDIA's NVLink for quite a while -- ever since the original announcement of Pascal -- but we've still not seen it put into broad use. That changes with NVIDIA's super-high-end Tesla P100, but it's still not shipping in huge quantities. What might come first is IBM's newest Linux-based servers, which also employ the use of NVLink for accelerated AI and deep-learning research. As you might suspect with the use of NVLink, IBM's latest Linux servers are GPU-focused, and because of that, IBM says that they can offer up to 80% better performance-per-dollar than solely x86-based servers. It's no secret that GPUs are highly parallel beasts, and NVIDIA itself has touted the benefits...
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The words "memory" and "breakthrough" are put together quite often, but unfortunately, it's actually pretty rare when we hear about such advances making it to market. Part of the reason for that is that some of these breakthroughs are so bleeding-edge, it's just not reasonable to expect them to hit the market that quickly. Based on what we're hearing from IBM's latest breakthrough, though, it doesn't seem like this is one of those advancements that will soon be forgotten. In its announcement, IBM talks about 3-bit phase-change memory that can endure "at least" 10 million write cycles - quite a gain over a USB flash drives' ~3,000 write cycle lifespan. It's not just lifespan that makes this phase-change...
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