Lifeboat Foundation

Published 6 mins ago.

WROCLAW, Poland/STOCKHOLM, June 16 (Reuters) — Intel (INTC.O) plans to invest up to $4.6 billion in a new semiconductor assembly and test facility near Wrocław, Poland, as part of a multi-billion-dollar investment drive across Europe to build chip capacity, it said on Friday.

The U.S. chipmaker last year announced plans to build a big chip complex in Germany along with facilities in Ireland and France as it seeks to benefit from European Commission’s eased funding rules and subsidies as the EU looks to cut its dependence on U.S. and Asian supply.

The facility in Poland will employ 2,000 workers and create several thousand additional jobs during the construction phase and hiring by suppliers, the company said in a statement.

Non-invasive methods, such as EEG and fNIRS, offer safer alternatives for BCI applications but must overcome obstacles related to signal quality and specificity.

The brain is regarded as one of the most complex known structures in the universe. It has billions of neurons, trillions of connections, and multiple levels ranging from cellular to molecular and synaptic. But the biggest challenge is that the brain is difficult to access.

“The brain is encased in a thick bone,” said Kinney, “and if you try to access, poke, or prod it, it will get really upset and hemorrhage, and delicate neurons will die.”

Nevertheless, Kinney said progress is being made on various fronts, particularly in the field of recording brain activity, which is good news for those trying to build brain-like computers.

By using error mitigation, IBM scientists believe they’ve worked around the quantum noise that plagues quantum processors.

The 12-qubit device will go out to a few academic research labs.

Intel does a lot of things, but it’s mostly noted for making and shipping a lot of processors, many of which have been named after bodies of water. So, saying that the company is set to start sending out a processor called Tunnel Falls would seem unsurprising if it weren’t for some key details. Among them: The processor’s functional units are qubits, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to pick one up on New Egg. Ever.

Tunnel Falls appears to be named after a waterfall near Intel’s Oregon facility, where the company’s quantum research team does much of its work. It’s a 12-qubit chip, which places it well behind the qubit count of many of Intel’s competitors—all of which are making processors available via cloud services. But Jim Clarke, who heads Intel’s quantum efforts, said these differences were due to the company’s distinct approach to developing quantum computers.

Typical superconducting quantum circuits, such as qubits—basic processing units of a quantum computer, must be operated at very low temperatures, of a few 10s of millikelvin, or hundredths of a degree from absolute zero temperature. These temperatures are today easily accessible in modern refrigerators. However, the intrinsic temperature of devices turns out to be much higher because the materials required to make good qubit circuits are by their nature very poor thermal conductors. This thermalization problem becomes more and more acute as the scale and complexity of circuits grow.

Much like water (or liquid nitrogen) cooling is sometimes used to effectively cool down high-performance digital computers, a quantum computer could benefit from similar liquid cooling. But at the very low temperatures that quantum circuits operate, most liquids will have turned into ice. Only two isotopes of Helium, Helium-3 and Helium-4, remain in the liquid form at millikelvin temperatures.

In recent work published in Nature Communications, researchers from the National Physical Laboratory, Royal Holloway University of London, Chalmers University of Technology and Google developed new technology to cool down a quantum circuit to less than a thousand of a degree above absolute zero, almost 100 times lower temperature than achieved before. This was made possible by immersing the circuit in liquid ³ He, chosen for its superior thermal properties.

A longtime board member at Nvidia Corp. dumped more than $48 million worth of the chip maker’s shares earlier this week, cashing in on the stock’s recent surge.

Harvey Jones, who has been on the Nvidia NVDA, +2.12% board since 1993, sold nearly of the company Tuesday at prices between $400 and $408.51, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission made public Wednesday. He pocketed $48.3 million through the transaction, which took place with shares that he held in his living trust.

Intel announced the next step on its road to quantum with the release of its latest quantum chip, a 12-qubit, silicon-based chip the company is calling “Tunnel Falls”. No, no, it’s okay, you can keep those greenbacks in your wallet: Intel isn’t in the commercialization phase yet. Instead, Tunnel Falls is meant to be a research test chip: it’s still a stepping stone towards the actual Quantum Processing Units of the future. Hopefully, those will be more like Intel’s own Tunnel Falls than Iran’s Amazon-based “quantum computing” technology.

“Tunnel Falls is Intel’s most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date and draws upon the company’s decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise. The release of the new chip is the next step in Intel’s long-term strategy to build a full-stack commercial quantum computing system. While there are still fundamental questions and challenges that must be solved along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, the academic community can now explore this technology and accelerate research development.” says Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of Quantum Hardware.

While it may be underwhelming to know that Tunnel Falls is just a research test chip, it’s also an often overlooked necessity for any new technology. Before any work can be done within the quantum computers of the future, the algorithms, the learning and the how-to have to be started today. One issue with that is the difficulty in producing quantum computing hardware; there’s a reason such a small number of big companies — from Intel to Microsoft, IBM, IonQ, and Google — are actively developing quantum computing hardware.