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> no more exciting than video cards Um... That seems like a pretty high bar to me, actually. Are you forgetting about how much they've done to speed up the tra
by macksd 4y ago
> no more exciting than video cards
Um... That seems like a pretty high bar to me, actually. Are you forgetting about how much they've done to speed up the training of quite a lot of deep-learning models? And really the only competition is TPUs and other dedicated chips that, at the end of the day, are also just chips optimized for matrix operations. The graphics in state of the art video games? Were I fan of crypto, mining rigs? That's some pretty impactful tech right there.
- rdlw 4y agoYes, but... we already have that. If quantum computing only provides a linear speedup, that can already be done with a conventional ASIC. I don't think it's a high bar for quantum computing to provide something that is not already commonly available. The real boon comes from at least quadratic runtime improvements. To be clear, I'm not saying that linear speedup is an innovation comparable to the video card, I'm saying it _is_ a glorified video card or ASIC.
- orlp 4y agoI think there's a formatting miscommunication here. The person you're replying to meant going from n^2 -> n^1.5, which isn't just a linear speedup. E.g. processing 1000 elements with an n^2 algorithm requires a million operations, with n^1.5 only ~31.5k. Processing a million elements goes from a trillion ops to a billion, a 1000x improvement.
- rdlw 4y agoHa! That explains a lot, I hadn't even considered it. Yes, a change like that would be massive, and I've just been fighting a guy I made up.