Daily Tech News 16 December 2022

• If you always wanted a quantum computer of your own but didn't have the millions of dollars and the endless rivers of liquid helium SpinQ has three portable models designed just for you sort of. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I say sort of because the theoretical capacity of a quantum computer scales exponentially with the number of qubits - each qubit essentially being another orthogonal dimension of parallel universes that the computer can compute in. IBM just announced a 433 qubit quantum computer, and 2^433 is a very big number.
  
  This matters because if SpinQ announced a cheap portable quantum computer with a large number of qubits we'd know immediately that it was bullshit. But the SpinQ qubit count maxes out at... 3.
  
  So, yeah, I'm prepared to believe that a $57,000, 90lb quantum that is slower than a first generation iPhone might actually exist.
  
  Probably not a hot item this Christmas though.
  
  
  
• All my remaining Amazon packages arrived today, including one from Kentucky that took an interesting route to get here.
  
  So I ordered some more.
  
  
  
• Guests arrive on the 27th. Gotta vacuum, or paint, or plant vines, or whatever you're supposed to do when you have guests.

• Next-generation graphics cards could get more expensive thanks to the death of SRAM. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I think they mean even more expensive here because the cheapest card from the current generation has a list price of $899.
  
  
  
• IBM has announced a 24 core Power CPU aimed directly at Oracle's pricing model. (The Register)
  
  Power-based servers tend to have fewer cores per CPU but lots of separate CPUs, which is great until you realise that Oracle prices per CPU rather than per core. This version has up to three times the cores per CPU - and the only reason for it to exist is to run Oracle SE2 cheaply.
  
  If you go to more than two CPUs - regardless of the number of cores - the Oracle license cost per CPU almost triples, so running six, eight-core CPUs instead of two 24-core CPUs would run about eight times as much in licensing fees - with a support contract, about half a million per year per server.
  
  
  
• A Cambridge PhD student has solved a Sanskrit grammar problem that has puzzled experts for 2500 years. (BBC)
  
  Which if you read the article makes the experts look kind of dumb.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT expects to make $1 billion in revenue by 2024. (Reuters)
  
  I didn't realise there was that much demand for terrible Gizmodo articles.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments