Narrow It Down!

S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises and vendors need to resist the urge to spend too much time defining broad marketing terms when it doesn’t really matter.

• Get your vendors to narrow their pitch to your industry/use cases.

IT in its early days was driven by technical terms. Magazines and advertisements were overflowing with megabytes per second and POSIX compliance and IEEE specifications. But things changed and it soon became clear that IT was a driver of business and that non-IT managers would need to become an integral part of the decision-making process. The marketing changed to something less technical and more approachable. But sometimes the pendulum swings too far, with must-have marketing terms that get spread out so far that they become meaningless. Common terms become umbrellas for what need to be more focused discussions, whether it is from a technical or non-technical standpoint.

Google Solidifies Position as a Trailblazer in High-Performance Computing with Purported Achievement of Quantum Supremacy

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• A draft research paper leaked the news that Google had achieved quantum supremacy.
• The accomplishment reinforces Google’s position as a thought leader in the realm of high-performance computing.

Last week, a draft research paper appeared and then was immediately removed, apparently leaking the news that Google had achieved quantum supremacy, meaning it had performed calculations that today’s high-speed computers could not accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Purportedly, Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, utilizing 53-qubits, performed calculations in 200 seconds that would have taken traditional supercomputers over 10,000 years to complete. The power and future potential of such an achievement are awe-inspiring, even if there are no practical applications today.