AceNik's Portal

A computer that can have a conversation with you in real, human language is a hallmark of science fiction films, but has always seemed ludicrously unrealistic. Here’s the thing: IBM just built one.

With the goal of creating a computer that can win at Jeopardy, a group at IBM has been hard at work on Watson for years.

The People’s Republic has unveiled more details on its quest to phase U.S.-made processors from its microchip diet. China’s next supercomputer will run purely on Chinese processors, possibly before the end of this year.

China has been developing its own CPUs at the state-run Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) for several years, but iterations of its chip – known as Loongson or “Dragon Core” – have been incapable of breaking into the elite ranks of supercomputing.

The folks working behind the scenes on the infrastructure of the Wolfram/Alpha search engine offered some details on the computing power for a new search engine that’s been referred to as a Google killer.

In the post, the team noted that once Wolfram/Alpha launches, it will be “one of the most computationally intensive” sites on the Internet and there’s no way of knowing exactly how much traffic to expect.