Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have reported a new vulnerability in Acer laptops that could be potentially weaponized to disable UEFI Secure Boot protection.

Ideas for quantum computing change the way we think about space and time.

November 28th, 2022 – GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, today announced to extend the instant 6GHz technology designed for Intel® Core™ i9-13900K and Core™ i7-13700K processors to the Z690 platform. By simply upgrading the latest BIOS of Z690 motherboards and activating the relevant settings, users can optimize their Intel® Core™ i9-13900K and Core™ i7-13700K processors to 6GHz for the performance boost on single-core up to 3%. This enables users who stay with the existing Z690 platform can enjoy the performance enhancement of the new CPU as well.

The latest Intel® 13th gen processor has impressed users with its class-leading performance. GIGABYTE’s Instant 6GHz on the Z790 platform was renowned for unleashing the performance of Intel® Core™ i9-13900K and Core™ i7-13700K processors for users in an easier way and is now employed on the Z690 platform. By simply upgrading the latest BIOS with Instant 6GHz activated, the system can automatically tweak CPU voltage and Vcore Load Line Calibration of Intel® Core™ i9-13900K and Core™ i7-13700K processors to detect the most two optimized cores running at 6GHz frequency. This further delivers a 3% performance boost on one single core like the Z790 platform.

GIGABYTE motherboards are notable for their exclusive VRM design, thermal design, and fine-tuning for convenience. To provide a superior user experience and maximum benefits to users, GIGABYTE brings Instant 6GHz technology to the Z690 platform for those who use Intel® 13th gen processor without upgrading to Z790 motherboards can also get a performance boost with ease.

Samsung has introduced (opens in new tab) its all-new type of GDDR6 memory that doubles the DRAM package’s capacity and increases interface width to double its peak bandwidth. Samsung’s GDDR6W chips use traditional BGA packaging and can be used for mainstream applications like the best graphics cards.

Contemporary GDDR6 and GDDR6X chips integrate one DRAM device with a 32-bit interface. By contrast, a GDDR6W chip packs two DRAM devices featuring and therefore features two 32-bit interfaces, thus doubling capacity (from 16Gb to 32Gb per chip) as well as interface width (from 32-bits to 64 bits). To do so, Samsung’s GDDR6W chips use the company’s Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) technology that replaces traditional printed circuit board with a redistribution layer (RDL) that is thinner and has significantly finer wiring patterns.

Samsung’s GDDR6W devices generally use the same protocols as GDDR6 but offer higher performance and capacity. For example, a 32Gb GDDR6W memory chip could deliver a peak bandwidth of 176 GBps, up from 88 GBps in the case of a regular GDDR6 SGRAM chip. Meanwhile, building a 32Gb memory chip using two 16Gb memory devices might be cheaper than building a 32Gb monolithic memory device.

D-Wave Systems, a pioneer in quantum annealing-based computing, today announced significant upgrades to its constrained quadratic model (CQM) hybrid solver that should make it easier to use and able to tackle much larger problems, said the company. The model can now handle optimization problems with up to 1 million variables (including continuous variables) and 100,000 constraints. In addition, D-Wave has introduced a “new [pre-solver] set of fast classical algorithms that reduces the size of the problem and allows for larger models to be submitted to the hybrid solver.”

While talk of using hybrid quantum-classical solutions has intensified recently among the gate-based quantum computer developer community, D-Wave has actively explored hybrid approaches for use with its quantum annealing computers for some time. It introduced a hybrid solver service (HSS) as part its Leap web access portal and Ocean SDK development kit that D-Wave in 2020. The broad hybrid idea is to use classical compute resources where they make sense – for example, GPUs perform matrix multiplication faster – and use quantum resources where they add benefit.

Continue reading “Quantum Annealing Pioneer D-Wave Introduces Expanded Hybrid Solver” »

Chipmakers are looking for ways to boost speed as the end of Moore’s Law looms. Do silicon photonic chips hold the key?

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Photonic quantum computing is one of the leading approaches to universal quantum computation. However, large-scale implementation of photonic quantum computing has been hindered by its intrinsic difficulties, such as probabilistic entangling gates for photonic qubits and lack of scalable ways to build photonic circuits. Here, we discuss how to overcome these limitations by taking advantage of two key ideas which have recently emerged. One is a hybrid qubit-continuous variable approach for realizing a deterministic universal gate set for photonic qubits. The other is the time-domain multiplexing technique to perform arbitrarily large-scale quantum computing without changing the configuration of photonic circuits. These ideas together will enable scalable implementation of universal photonic quantum computers in which hardware-efficient error correcting codes can be incorporated. Furthermore, all-optical implementation of such systems can increase the operational bandwidth beyond terahertz in principle, ultimately enabling large-scale fault-tolerant universal quantum computers with ultrahigh operation frequency.

A multi-institutional team has created an efficient method for measuring high-dimensional qudits encoded in quantum frequency combs, a kind of photon source, on a single optical chip using already available experimental and computational resources.

Despite the fact that the word “qudit” may appear to be a typo, this less well-known relative of the qubit, or quantum bit, has the ability to carry more data and is more noise-resistant, two crucial characteristics required to enhance the performance of quantum networks, quantum key distribution systems, and eventually the quantum internet.

In contrast to traditional computer bits, which classify data as ones or zeros, qubits can hold values of one, zero, or both. This is due to superposition, a phenomenon that enables several quantum states to exist simultaneously. Qudit’s “d” refers to the variety of levels or values that may be encoded on a photon. Traditional qubits only have two levels, but by adding more levels, they become qudits.

An update for AMD’s ROCm general-purpose GPU software has reportedly revealed the specs for Navi 32 and Navi 33, (opens in new tab) the next graphics chips likely to be released in the RDNA 3 series, otherwise known as Radeon RX-7000 series. Exactly where the new chips will slot into AMD’s new Radeon RX 7000-series (opens in new tab) is the really big question.

Are these chips the basis of the upcoming Radeon RX 7,800 and 7,700 GPUs? Hold that thought while we consider the new information that’s emerged. Buried deep within an ROCm file called “performance.hpp” are references to both Navi 32 and Navi. But the really critical numbers listed in the file are 60 and 32, and we’re talking CUs or Compute Units. To make sense of those numbers, the Navi 31 chip inside the AMD Radeon RX 7,900 XT and XTX graphics cards runs 96 CUs.