Researchers at Intel and QuTech, an advanced quantum computing research center consisting of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), have successfully created the first silicon qubits at scale at Intel’s D1 manufacturing factory in Hillsboro, Oregon. The result is a process that can fabricate more than 10,000 arrays with several silicon-spin qubits on a single wafer with greater than 95% yield. This achievement is dramatically higher in both qubit count and yield than the typical university and laboratory processes used today.
This research was published in the journal Nature Electronics and is Intel’s first peer-reviewed research demonstrating the successful fabrication of qubits on 300mm silicon. The new process uses advanced transistor fabrication techniques including all-optical lithography to produce silicon-spin qubits, the same equipment used to produce Intel’s latest-generation complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) chips. The groundbreaking research is a crucial step forward in the path toward scaling quantum chips, demonstrating that it’s possible for qubits to eventually be produced alongside conventional chips in the same industrial manufacturing facilities.
Today, Intel contributed the Scalable I/O Virtualization (SIOV) specification to the Open Compute Project (OCP) with Microsoft, enabling device and platform manufacturers access to an industry standard specification for hyperscale virtualization of PCI Express and Compute Express Link devices in cloud servers. When adopted, SIOV architecture will enable data center operators to deliver more cost-effective access to high-performance accelerators and other key I/O devices for their customers, as well as relieve I/O device manufacturers of cost and programming burdens imposed under previous standards.
Today at the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), two Intel-supported whitepapers on spoken language datasets are being presented. The first paper, The People’s Speech, targets “automatic speech recognition” tasks; the second is Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC), which involves “keyword spotting.” Datasets coming out of each project contribute a sizeable volume of rich audio data, and each is among the largest collection available in its class.
The MSWC paper is co-authored by Keith Achorn, an AI frameworks engineer in Intel’s Software and Advanced Technology Group (SATG). Keith talks about his experiences on the project in a blog on the Intel Community site.
In a recent global study by Ponemon Institute,1 73% of IT decision-makers say they are more likely to purchase technologies and services from companies that proactively find, mitigate and communicate security vulnerabilities.
Intel is committed to product and security assurance and regularly releases functional and security updates for supported products and services. The Intel platform update (IPU) helps simplify the update process and improve predictability for Intel’s customers and partners. The updates provide security and functional improvements across Intel’s product portfolio.
“Security doesn’t just happen. If you are not finding vulnerabilities, then you are not looking hard enough,” said Suzy Greenberg, vice president, Intel Product Assurance and Security. “Intel takes a transparent approach to security assurance to empower customers and deliver product innovations that build defenses at the foundation, protect workloads and improve software resilience.”
In the first ‘Behind the Builders,’ Intel Fellow Johanna Swan explains how chip packaging went from a basic utility to ‘a real inflection point, maximizing performance per volume.’
Johanna Swan, Intel Fellow, Director of Package & Systemes Research, Components Research
In describing Intel’s foray into customer chipmaking through Intel Foundry Services and how it stands apart, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has repeatedly cited “our world-class packaging and assembly test technologies.” Gelsinger told investors last month that “we are seeing extreme interest in our packaging technologies” from potential foundry customers.
Packaging has never seen so much love.
But for Johanna Swan, deferred adoration goes with the job. As director of Package and Systems Research in Intel’s Components Research group, Swan says, “We have to anticipate what the future demands are and get focused on what we believe is going to have value — but it’s going to be five years-plus out.”
What’s New: Today, Intel breaks beyond the 5 GHz barrier for laptops with the launch of the 10th Gen Intel® Core™ H-series mobile processors. Headlined by the 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10980HK1 processor, the H-series delivers desktop-caliber performance that gamers and creators can take anywhere.
“Today’s introduction of the 10th Gen Intel Core H-series mobile platform extends Intel’s gaming leadership, delivering desktop-caliber performance in a mobile form factor and breadth of choice with more than 100 laptop designs launching this year, including more than 30 thin-and-light systems. The new platform is optimized for enthusiasts and creators by delivering the fastest frequency in the industry with 5 GHz across the majority of the volume which will deliver amazing game play and rich creation for users.”
–Fredrik Hamberger, general manager of the premium and gaming laptop segments at Intel
Why It’s Important: Gamers are moving increasingly toward mobile systems and they care about the flexibility of gaming where they want to as much as they do the raw performance of their systems, ranking processor speed in their top three most important features2. Packed with incredible performance typically only available from desktops, 10th Gen Intel Core laptop processors deliver faster performance with up to 5.3 GHz3 Turbo, eight cores and 16 threads to enable immersive gaming experiences with amazing responsiveness and consistent in-game performance. Games and applications continue to depend on high-frequency cores and Intel is pushing the frequency envelope to achieve lower latency and deliver the best PC gaming experience on a laptop.
These “chips” let you game on your PC, navigate a car or improve your daily life with artificial intelligence algorithms.
They’re the most complex devices manufactured. And it takes the world’s most advanced manufacturing technologies and the expertise of thousands of engineers, technicians and architects to create them.
A new animated video, “How Intel Makes Chips: Concept to Customer,” offers a simple overview of the manufacturing process – from design engineering through mask operations and assembly and testing – to create these tiny but fiendishly complex devices.
What’s New: Today at a gathering of industry influencers, Intel welcomed the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) with updates on new products designed to accelerate AI system development and deployment from cloud to edge. Intel demonstrated its Intel® Nervana™ Neural Network Processors (NNP) for training (NNP-T1000) and inference (NNP-I1000) — Intel’s first purpose-built ASICs for complex deep learning with incredible scale and efficiency for cloud and data center customers. Intel also revealed its next-generation Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ Vision Processing Unit (VPU) for edge media, computer vision and inference applications.
“With this next phase of AI, we’re reaching a breaking point in terms of computational hardware and memory. Purpose-built hardware like Intel Nervana NNPs and Movidius Myriad VPUs are necessary to continue the incredible progress in AI. Using more advanced forms of system-level AI will help us move from the conversion of data into information toward the transformation of information into knowledge.”
–Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Artificial Intelligence Products Group
What’s New: Today at the Linley Fall Processor Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel revealed the first architectural details related to Tremont. Intel’s newest and most advanced low-power x86 CPU architecture, Tremont offers a significant performance boost over prior generations.
“Tremont is Intel’s most advanced low-power x86 architecture to date. We focused on a range of modern, complex workloads, while considering networking, client, browser and battery so that we could raise performance efficiently across the board. It is a world-class CPU architecture designed for enhanced processing power in compact, low-power packages.”
–Stephen Robinson, Intel Tremont Chief Architect
Why It Matters: Tremont next-generation low-power x86 microarchitecture delivers significant IPC (instructions per cycle) gains gen-over-gen compared with Intel’s prior low-power x86 architectures. Designed for enhanced processing power in compact, low-power packages, Tremont-based processors will enable a new generation of innovative form factors for client devices, creative applications for the internet of things (IoT), efficient data center products and more. Read the rest of Intel Introduces Tremont Microarchitecture
Recent Findings Should be Celebrated, but Practical Realities are the Real Test
By Rich Uhlig
Quantum computing receives a lot of attention due to its potential to take on problems beyond the reach of today’s computers, such as new drug discovery, financial modeling and exploring how the universe works.
Universities, governments and technology companies around the world are striving to achieve a commercially-viable quantum computing system. While the collective progress is real – and is getting noticed – the field is still at mile one of what will be a marathon toward quantum computing’s commercialization.
That said, important milestones along this journey should be recognized, celebrated and built upon.
More Promising Results
As researchers at Intel and across the globe are discovering, quantum computing has the potential to tackle problems that conventional computing – even the world’s most powerful supercomputers – can’t quite handle.
Today, it was confirmed that researchers from Google had demonstrated the extraordinary speed of quantum, as compared to traditional supercomputers, with a benchmark test known as “quantum supremacy.” The Google team designed an algorithm that could run an analysis in 200 seconds on a small quantum processor, a 53-qubit superconducting test chip, that would take the most powerful supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to perform.
