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mathattack 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is:
1 - Audit your customers
2 - Buy back shares
3 - Force early retirements
It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production.
I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.
rr808 4 hours ago [-]
Their business model is more like make a lot of noise about high tech, then hire h1bs to do routine IT work their corporate customers do.
coredog64 2 hours ago [-]
That's Kyndryl: They spun it off into it's own entity after "IBM Global Services" had such a (deservedly) poor reputation that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for clients and employees. Not that Kyndryl is any better, but it's enough of a rebrand that you might fool decision makers for the few minutes that it takes to get them to buy in.
sublinear 3 hours ago [-]
Their corporate customers also do that to their own customers.
postalcoder 6 hours ago [-]
Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.
I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.
Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.
> Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.
I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?
What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).
hiddencost 3 hours ago [-]
> IBM is generally considered the leader
You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.
esseph 16 minutes ago [-]
They are either the #1 or #2 quantum company in the world next to Google and Quantinuum.
They also keep getting pumped full of DoD money for quantum foundries and modular systems research.
Traubenfuchs 4 hours ago [-]
I remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago…
I don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow.
Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
It’s impressive to have the first major AI platform and then completely bungle it.
calebkaiser 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, Watson was a classic open domain QA system originally, no deep learning or much of what we think of in an "AI platform" today. It was one of a bunch of such systems that were built in that early 2000s period. They all failed because the approach fundamentally didn't work very well.
Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.
senthil_rajasek 5 hours ago [-]
I now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India.
They are all sweatshops these days.
winfredJa 5 hours ago [-]
financial companies have always been sweatshops but it wasnt the case for IBM before dot com.
izanton 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't really understand how quantum chips work, but it's so interesting and cool (or it's not)
ktallett 3 minutes ago [-]
It massively depends on what type of quantum chip it is, so often the confusion is that there is no one specific method. Especially as we are too early in the development cycle to have a clear winner (although Photonic computing is gaining traction).
caminante 8 hours ago [-]
This is a pro-IBM piece.
I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps.
I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.
madanparas 9 hours ago [-]
The real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.
Zigurd 9 hours ago [-]
Is there enough agreement regarding what is a quantum chip, and what process technology is necessary to make one?
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
I guess it's a balance. If you think their process makes workable chips for your designs, then you can use it. If you can't adapt your design to what they can build, then you need to build your own foundry. Chances are a reliable supplier will push the market in the direction of their process.
If we had someone making GaAs processors in the 1980s for a price competitive with their silicon counterparts and with a long-term roadmap, we'd have very different computers now. And some extra toxic waste problems.
ghaff 8 hours ago [-]
I've been out of the space for a bit. IBM has been betting on the engineered superconducting approach, which makes sense given their background, but there are other options, often for potentially different problem areas. Need to dive back in.
ktallett 1 minutes ago [-]
The superconducting approach is great in principle but has so many issues that need to be solved, from cooling, to energy to cool, to max number of qubits before you can't cool to operating temperature, before optimal connectivity to rest of system and so on. I am of the view photonics is the way forward but as you say, it will depend on the task at hand partially.
imglorp 8 hours ago [-]
Is there any agreement regarding real applications that warrant fab volume or is this still speculation?
bawolff 8 hours ago [-]
There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are. Unfortunately these projects are basically useless when it comes to them.
icegreentea2 8 hours ago [-]
Can you clarify? Do you mean that superconducting qubits are unable to perform the "real applications" theoretically, or that superconducting qubits at the scale this foundry could produce will be unable, or that superconducting qubits that will foundry could produce will still be outperformed by classical techniques?
bawolff 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, we are no where near the scale [qubit count] & quality where the applications apply. Not just this foundry but in general. I suppose the point is to eventually get there, but we are not close yet.
You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
ghaff 8 hours ago [-]
I don't have the same level of cynicism with quantum that I had with enterprise blockchain. (Hey, I spent a number of years getting sucked into things that didn't pan out along with some that did in a big way.) I pretty much agree with respect to quantum. Practical value is probably further away than a number of folks were betting on at one point though I still believe it's there.
4 hours ago [-]
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
> You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
The good thing is that someone who can make lots of chips can reduce the effort it takes to do R&D. With more people researching possible applications, it's likely we'll progress more quickly.
NooneAtAll3 7 hours ago [-]
> There is high agreement on what the real applications of Quantum computing are.
and what are those applications?
skissane 6 hours ago [-]
The most obvious one is SIGINT agencies breaking RSA, DSA, ECDSA, ECDH, etc.
Of course, the plan is by the time quantum computers become capable of breaking those algorithms in practice, the industry will have moved to post-quantum cryptography algorithms.
But there will still be legacy systems which haven't, and also encrypted data recorded in the past in the expectation they'd be able to decrypt it in the future.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
- better simultion of quantum systems (this is the actual important one despite nobody seeming to care)
- breaking a lot of traditional public key crypto (this gets a lot of attention, but its not that big a deal because there are alternatives)
- in theory i guess quadratic improvement on unstructured search. I think its unlikely to be practically relavent.
eff-nix 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
alphager 3 hours ago [-]
Logistics would love to optimize the traveling salesman problem.
malux85 1 hours ago [-]
Is that actually true in the real world? Or is that some comp sci algorithm dream? I suspect it might be an engineers fallacy where the romantic desire to reduce everything to an algorithm or scalar value that can then be maximized or minimized blinds the engineer to the reality of the situation - the businesses doing route planning already have something thats close enough to optimal so that if the travelling salesman problem was solved, it wouldn't make a material difference to the business.
The algorithm engineer is so in love with the idea that an algorithm is the solution to everyone's problem (its a natural human bias to think the world desires what we have) that they way overweigh the importance of route planning improvements which are incremental or worse - would be thrown away because the practicalities of implementation doesn't warrant the marginal improvements.
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
First? Europeans are already producing quantum processors at research scale, soon industrial scale.
Bet this got Elon Musk's attention, his dreams about his TerraFab.
Scubabear68 2 hours ago [-]
I am not surprised, but disappointed, to see something like the CHIPS Act be used for something which is still in ultra-super-unbelievably-early-research-phase. Put more candidly, something not currently useful like Quantum computing.
Looks like just a handout to IBM.
ArchieScrivener 7 hours ago [-]
A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy.
So much for capitalism.
dvh 9 hours ago [-]
Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?
upofadown 4 hours ago [-]
From the article:
>IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system.
The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves).
So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.
bawolff 8 hours ago [-]
If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.
andrewstuart 3 hours ago [-]
IBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days?
For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”.
But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability.
They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?
AlotOfReading 3 hours ago [-]
IBM still sells extremely POWERful systems, but they don't seem particularly interested in expanding the market.
I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.
throwawaypath 2 hours ago [-]
They also charge you for every instruction cycle on the machines (look up MIPS licensing) you own. Imagine if NVIDIA started doing that with their GPUs: spend $2500 on a GPU and then pay NVIDIA a royalty fee for every hour of workload you put on it.
kev009 2 hours ago [-]
Two different product lines. POWER systems are sold by the socket, on the higher end sometimes you get some license disabled cores but it's usually trivial. Mainframes are the opposite, you usually get the full monty machine that is extremely limited by licensing.
DeathArrow 7 hours ago [-]
Two questions:
-do the chips help with inference?
-can you run Doom on the chips?
rbanffy 7 hours ago [-]
Being for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.
stogot 10 hours ago [-]
The article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...
1 - Audit your customers
2 - Buy back shares
3 - Force early retirements
It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production.
I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.
I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.
Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...
I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?
What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).
You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.
They also keep getting pumped full of DoD money for quantum foundries and modular systems research.
https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...
Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?
Here's a write up of some relevant history if you're curious https://liweinlp.com/1465
They are all sweatshops these days.
I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps.
I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.
If we had someone making GaAs processors in the 1980s for a price competitive with their silicon counterparts and with a long-term roadmap, we'd have very different computers now. And some extra toxic waste problems.
You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
The good thing is that someone who can make lots of chips can reduce the effort it takes to do R&D. With more people researching possible applications, it's likely we'll progress more quickly.
and what are those applications?
Of course, the plan is by the time quantum computers become capable of breaking those algorithms in practice, the industry will have moved to post-quantum cryptography algorithms.
But there will still be legacy systems which haven't, and also encrypted data recorded in the past in the expectation they'd be able to decrypt it in the future.
- breaking a lot of traditional public key crypto (this gets a lot of attention, but its not that big a deal because there are alternatives)
- in theory i guess quadratic improvement on unstructured search. I think its unlikely to be practically relavent.
The algorithm engineer is so in love with the idea that an algorithm is the solution to everyone's problem (its a natural human bias to think the world desires what we have) that they way overweigh the importance of route planning improvements which are incremental or worse - would be thrown away because the practicalities of implementation doesn't warrant the marginal improvements.
https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million
Looks like just a handout to IBM.
So much for capitalism.
>IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system.
The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves).
So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.
For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”.
But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability.
They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?
I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.
-do the chips help with inference?
-can you run Doom on the chips?