Stephen Nellis
stephennellis.bsky.social
Stephen Nellis
@stephennellis.bsky.social
Reporter at Reuters covering semiconductors, hardware and other technology topics from Silicon Valley.
Try a full reboot. If that doesn’t work, throw your laptop in the nearest body of water and leave it for 24 hours, then send to IT.
December 10, 2024 at 9:21 PM
It’s all about how it’s managed by IT. A dedicated enough IT department can ruin an Apple computer, though usually not to the same degree. (I also had the Great Reuters Trackpad Freakout of 2024 yesterday..)
December 10, 2024 at 5:39 PM
But the company is hopeful that it has found an approach that it will work. And that's why Google did not give a headline number of logical qubits, which they said would land between 10-20 with the current chip. But Google said it's more focused on finding an approach that will scale.
December 10, 2024 at 1:13 AM
The key breakthrough was finding an array arrangement of qubits such that Google can continuously scale up the number of qubits and drive error rates down. Google say sit still has several orders of magnitude reduction to go before its next milestone.
December 10, 2024 at 1:13 AM
Wow, that sucks! I should probably be more paranoid!
November 28, 2024 at 2:33 AM
Oh no, that is awful! How did it happen? At a gig?
November 28, 2024 at 1:17 AM
My biggest ever regret was selling the first really nice guitar I ever owned - an American Standard Strat in Lake Placid Blue - to help fund a Les Paul Classic during a heavy metal phase.
November 28, 2024 at 12:19 AM
We have yet to see the last of the major grants, so we also do not yet know who else will get a haircut to adjust for this DoD contract. TSMC did not. Will Samsung? Will smaller firms get shaved? (end)
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
So Intel had been in line for $8.5 billion in grants. Instead, it ended up w/ a $7.86 billion grant, and a $3 billion DoD contract. We know very little about that contract (it's classified) so we don't know how comparable it is to the CHIPS Act money, or what Intel's costs will be to fulfill it.
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
@politico.com did a lot of reporting on how nearly 10% of money that was supposed to revitalize the U.S. chip industry got re-routed to a defense project - it was essentially at Intel's behest, according to Politico's reporting -

www.politico.com/news/2024/05...
‘I don’t know how this happened’: A $3B secret program undermining Biden’s tech policy
The Commerce Department was expecting to hand out new federal money to high-tech research. Congress sent it to a secretive natsec program instead.
www.politico.com
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
...so a danger in having specialized "defense only" factories is they'll either go out of date very quickly compared to commercial fabs, and/or be incredibly expensive. I'm not here to settle that debate, but I will point out that it was controversial to see a defense program funded by CHIPS Act.
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
...or specialized facilities that only do defense work. As most folks in the chip industry will tell you, the demand from the defense sector is just not that large compared to the broader industry, and if you'll recall, the chip industry is all about scale....
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
This was framed in some quarters as a stumble for Intel, but I've been wondering whether it was instead a masterstroke of political engineering. There's been a long-running debate about whether it's better to build a defense supply chain from commercial fabs...
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
This shave off was expected, and was in part due to Intel winning a large contract with the Defense Department for $3 billion that came out of the same pot of federal money - www.reuters.com/technology/i...
Intel expects US to shave chip-making grant, sources say
Intel expects the U.S. government to reduce a preliminary subsidy of $8.5 billion to build more chip factories, two sources familiar with the matter said on Monday, weeks after the company received a separate $3 billion deal with the Pentagon.
www.reuters.com
November 27, 2024 at 12:09 AM
And here's a demo (with what sounds like an AI generated Jensen Huang voiceover?) - www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj1S...
Audio AI Fugatto Generates Sound from Text | NVIDIA Research
YouTube video by NVIDIA Developer
www.youtube.com
November 26, 2024 at 11:50 PM