Microsoft's Cool Quantum Computing Plan Embraces Cryogenic Memory (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader shares a PCWorld report: Microsoft has crazy quantum computing plans: first, it built hardware based on a particle that hasn't even been discovered. Now, it's hoping to co-design super-cool memory for quantum computers. The company is working with Rambus to develop and build prototype computers with memory subsystems that can be cooled at cryogenic temperatures, typically below minus 180 degrees Celsius or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit. Cryogenics goes hand in hand with quantum computers, which promise to be significantly faster than today's PCs and servers and may even eventually replace them. But the systems are notoriously unstable and need to be stored in refrigerators for faster and secure operation. As an example, D-Wave's 2000Q quantum computer needs to be kept significantly cooler than supercomputers so operations don't break down.

Comments

I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

since they so often stand against progress. I know my friends that work there on the Windows build team that make $12 per hour would agree.

Re: I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Microsoft pays only just above minimum wage so they don't get very forward looking employees.

Re: I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't want employees. They want drones.

Re:I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft these days only wants minimum wage employees. They aren't interested in research wrt quantum computing.

Re:I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of my friend at Microsoft make $12 per hour, and they can't stand for what is right.

Re:I doubt this...

[110010001000]

Found the MS guy who got laid off from the QA department.

Re:I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

And they are the lucky ones since so many MS employees make less/

Re:I doubt this...

[110010001000]

When DID they care?

Re:I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They pay so many employees $12 per hour so we can't expect quality.

Re: I doubt this...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are such an obvious douche

Re:I doubt this...

[gweihir]

Quantum-"computing" is not progress. It is a scam that may never work and will not work for any meaningful tasks anytime soon. Perfect for MS and Rambus, as the two companies have long end extensive experience with ripping off their customers.

Re:I doubt this...

[howlingmad]

$hit. I was just thinking about a career in QA :(

A few corrections

[110010001000]

Quantum computers do not promise to be faster than digital computers for most tasks. In fact they are only suited for a single type of task. Furthermore, D-Wave is a total scam. They don't even have a quantum computer. Now you have been edumacted.

Re:A few corrections

[amorsen]

Rambus is a scam too, so they fit in well.

Re:A few corrections

[110010001000]

Forgot about that one..so right. Now it all fits together. Maybe they are powered by the emDrive too.

Re:A few corrections

[rtb61]

The whole article a scam, total scummy exercise in marketing, the whole goal, join two words together to implant the idea in the readers mind because suckers 'Microsoft's cool', welcome to the world of PR=B$, public relations psychological manipulation. M$=B$ is far more accurate. How uncool is M$ in the public eye, easy, how many phones can they sell. To allow in turn over in their stores, they have to sell Android, over their own crap brand. Can not sell Windows anal probe 10, give it away free, can not give it away, force people to use it and even make them pay to have their privacy invaded. M$ that is fucking uncool, as is the privacy invasive probe, also attempting to force it up there is also wildly uncool, blocking use of hardware extremely uncool, I could not imagine a more uncool company. Thanks to windows 10, I have stopped buying PC software, nothing for months and that will continue to replacement.

Re:A few corrections

[raftpeople]

D-Wave isn't a total scam, it is definitely using quantum effects to solve some problems (annealing) faster than traditional computers. But the design limits which problems it can be applied to and how much it can scale. Other quantum computers that entangle all particles into one group (vs multiple smaller groups like d-wave) don't have the same limitation.

Re:A few corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

> Furthermore, D-Wave is a total scam

Thank god other people can see this. When a company can't tell you how their chip works... maybe it doesn't.

Re:A few corrections

[110010001000]

No it isn't. They are using a regular digital computer running annealing algorithms. Total scam.

Re:A few corrections

[gweihir]

Actually, the D-Wave is not faster than a conventional computer that is orders of magnitude cheaper. Simply use the best algorithm for each architecture. The only situation where the D-Wave is faster is if the conventional computer simulates the D-Wave. That does not make any sense, except as a marketing stunt for the gullible.

Re:A few corrections

[gweihir]

Indeed. Like most of Quantum-"Computing" these days. Call me again when they can break RSA-300 or so, which was broken by conventional computers quite a while ago. The thing is, the number of entangled qbits seem to have been growing sub-linear with time. May well be that quantum computers scale inverse exponentially with effort, and that would mean somewhere is a border where you just cannot get more and that one seems to be pretty low. There may also be an actual hard boundary that no amount of effort can overcome. Hence, a few hundred qbits may be all that is possible in this universe. That is basically worthless.

Re:A few corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

"How uncool is M$ in the public eye, easy, how many phones can they sell."
Judging by the number of people using MS products the public evidently doesn't give a shit about whether MS is cool or not. And do you know why Linux has never really captured more of the desktop market? It's because users do not use Operating Systems they run applications. You can complain about MS all you want but at least be honest with your criticisms. For better or worse MS and Apple pioneered the personal computing age. And Apple needed a loan from MS to keep operating while they were getting ready to release the iPod. After that bump in the road Apple was able to move onto bigger and better things.

And who cares if their quantum computer project ever becomes practical at least someone is committing the resources needed to explore the possibilities. They are spending the money knowing full well that their plans may never come to fruition. Or do you think the next generation of computers is just going to magically appear? And MS is just one company spending the resources to research this technology.

And MS doesn't have to sell their own phones when the get a cut on every mobile phone running on Android because of patents they hold. And if you their patents are BS or not valid in any way than why don't all the deep pockets in the mobile phone market challenge them?

Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

"A particle that doesn't exist yet"

Re:Vaporware

[slew]

"A particle that doesn't exist yet"

Technically a particle system that is theorized to exist, but not yet isolated: An anyon particle system with a state degeneracy which exhibits non-Abelian particle exchange statistics.

Apparently, with such a particle system, it is possible to build a topological quantum computer.

Experimental physicists potentially observed such a system in nanowires made from the semiconductor indium antimonide. More recent experiments suggest that it is possible that ultra-pure, ultra-cold, ultra-magnetized gallium arsenide crystals might exhibit such statistics, but verification remains unresolved...

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

"A particle that doesn't exist yet"

Technically a particle system that is theorized to exist, but not yet isolated:

So does that imply a new type of particle in the usual sense (electrons, positrons, neutrinos etc) or in some more abstract sense?

And by "theorised to exist", again, does that mean "predicted by some postulated variant of string theory / supersymmetry / unified theory of everything (like, say, sparticles or phonons)" or "follows from standard, well tested theory, but not yet observed in the wild (eg the postulated island of stability for very isotopes with very heavy nuclei)"?

Re:Vaporware

[slew]

"A particle that doesn't exist yet"

Technically a particle system that is theorized to exist, but not yet isolated:

So does that imply a new type of particle in the usual sense (electrons, positrons, neutrinos etc) or in some more abstract sense?

The anyon particle is a more abstract type called a quasi-particle. An anyon would be an isolatable effect in a *real* system, where the system is constrained in a specific way. As a way of analogy, if you had an electron travelling through a semiconductor, you can think as a really complicated system of electrons travelling thorough a sea/lattice of nuclei, or you can think of it as a quasi-electron quantum particle travelling in a more homogeneous media. An Anyon is simply a ordinary particle constrained by the system to a two-dimensional system in a specific way. A quasi-particle is mostly just a mathematical apparatus to simply solving a many-body quantum-mechanical problem using a quantum-field theory approach (rather than a quantum N-body approach).

And by "theorised to exist", again, does that mean "predicted by some postulated variant of string theory / supersymmetry / unified theory of everything (like, say, sparticles or phonons)" or "follows from standard, well tested theory, but not yet observed in the wild (eg the postulated island of stability for very isotopes with very heavy nuclei)"?

Well phonons are also quasi-particles, and they doesn't require string theory or supersymmetry or unified field theory. All phonons do is describe vibrations in crystal lattices (a real phenomena). You can think of the vibrations as quasi-particles that have "mass" and "inertia", "boundary-conditions", etc, but at the end of the day the math describes a real measurable phenomena in the crystal lattice. It's just a different way to do the math.

Anyons are quasi-particles that should mathematically occur in *real* 2-dimensional constrained systems (e.g., crystal surfaces, graphene layers, etc). Kind of like there are fermions and bosons particles which have different statistical properties which cause systems to *get-weird* in different ways when you reduce the degrees of freedom (you can google about cooling a bose-einstein condensate), these 2D anyons mathematically occur in two statistical types: Abelian and non-Abelian. Anyon quasi-particles obeying Abelian statistics have *already* been observed in nature and are key to understanding the fractional quantum hall effect.

Discovery of a system with anyon quasi-particles obeying non-Abelian statistics would be key in creating so-called "braids" which are hypothesized to be a much more stable quantum system from which to implement a quantum computer rather than using spin or polarization (which is what most people use now and suffer from very fast quantum decoherence time).

Being a quasi-particle, physicists are not so-much discovering an anyon particle, but attempting to construct *real-world* two-dimensionally constrained quantum systems that should exhibit this mathematical property, and then experimentally verifying that it has the properties theorized. This is the part that hasn't been done yet.

Re:Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the explanation - interesting stuff!

Wow, deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the cryotron?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Miscreant-o-soft's long-term business plan:

[Anonymous Coward]

* Force installment of Windows 10 by all possible means, thus gaining control of as many PCs as possible to swell bot-net node numbers
* Subvert and otherwise annex as many pre-Windows 10 systems as possible with 'security updates'
* Invest vast sums of money into perfecting Quantum Computing
* Use MS-owned Quantum Computing clusters to hack all non-Windows 10 systems as possible, force installation of Windows 10
* SKYNET
* Satya Nadella revealed to be Terminator from the future, come to destroy humanity

THIS HAS BEEN A CAUTIONARY TALE. Install Linux as soon as possible, help everyone else do the same. SAVE HUMANITY.

FALSE

[Anonymous Coward]

>quantum computers, which promise to be significantly faster than today's PCs and servers and may even eventually replace them

This is not how quantum computing works. Classical computing is complemented by it, not replaced.

Slashdot has become a wasteland

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the comments on this article. It's damn embarrassing. What a has been site this is. Makes me sad and reminiscent for the late 90s-early 2000s.

Re:Slashdot has become a wasteland

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot comments are basically a bot:
if $newthing "new thing is bad because new! what we use now is flawless!!"
if $bigCompnay "$bigCompany is bad! therefore anything $bigCompany does is bad!"
if $newthing & $bigCompany "frothing rage"

Particle that does not exist

[manu0601]

What is this particle that does not exist? TFA does not tell about it. Because it does not exist?

Re:Particle that does not exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's called Quantum Mechanics. Subtle experiments fool lots of physicalist grant-poodles into "believing" Heisenberg/Dirac theory. Pure bullshit at Base. See Einstein , DeBroglie and Bohm for insight!

Microsoft are Privacy Rapists

[Anonymous Coward]

So I don't give a fuck what they do. Always trying to crawl up your butt to see what you ate your last meal in the hope of selling that info to advertisers. Fuck off, Microsoft.
 
"MICROSOFT has reiterated the importance of siphoning information from Windows 10 Creators Update users, branding this diagnostic data the "life-blood" for the operating system." http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/793285/Windows-10-Creators-Update-Download-Update-Data-Collection

With Rambus?

[gweihir]

So two con-experts having decided to con their customers even more? Fits.