Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Microsoft says it sees two clear peaks at the ends of a wire, with a nice energy separation between those and any other energy states. (credit: Microsoft)

So far, two primary quantum computing technologies have been commercialized. One type of hardware, called a transmon, involves superconducting wire loops linked to a resonator; it is used by companies like Google, IBM, and Rigetti. Companies like Quantinuum and IonQ have instead used individual ions held in light traps. At the moment, both technologies are in an awkward place. They’ve clearly been demonstrated to work, but they need some significant scaling and quality improvements before they can perform useful computations.

It may be a bit surprising to see that Microsoft is committed to an alternative technology called “topological qubits.” This technology is far enough behind other options that the company just announced it has worked out the physics to make a qubit. To understand Microsoft’s approach better, Ars talked to Microsoft engineer Chetan Nayak about the company’s progress and plans.

The foundation of a qubit

Microsoft is starting behind some competitors because the basic physics of its system weren’t entirely figured out. The company’s system relies on the controlled production of a “Majorana particle,” something that was only demonstrated to exist within the last decade (and even then, its discovery has been controversial).

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Big banks fear that Swift faces a growing threat of Russian cyberattacks after seven of the country’s lenders were kicked off the global payments messaging system over the weekend.

VTB, Russia’s second-biggest bank, and Promsvyazbank, which finances Russia’s war machine, were among the lenders removed on Saturday from Swift as part of the West’s sanctions campaign against Moscow in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

Senior executives responsible for cybersecurity at several banks told the Financial Times that the threat to Swift, which enables banks to send trillions in payments across borders every day, could escalate if more of Russia’s lenders are expelled from the system.

Enlarge / The 5800X3D is Zen 3 with extra cache. (credit: AMD)

AMD will release its latest experiment in CPU packaging to the general public next month. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, is an eight-core Zen 3 processor that uses unique memory-stacking technology to triple the amount of L3 cache in the standard Ryzen 7 5800X—96MB of L3 cache instead of 32MB.

The result is a chip that ought to run games 15 percent faster than a Ryzen 9 5900X, according to AMD’s figures. The company also says the chip will run games faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K, though it didn’t say by how much. The processor goes on sale for $449 starting on April 20th.

The 5800X3D and the half-dozen low-end Zen 2 and Zen 3 processors AMD announced today are likely the last hurrah for Socket AM4, the physical socket that AMD has been using since just before the introduction of the first Ryzen chips back in 2017. The years since have seen AMD regain its competitive footing against Intel thanks to several strong iterations on the original Zen architecture and use of TSMC’s 7 nm manufacturing process.