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Showing posts from October, 2018

You Want Real Quantum Computing? Follow the Rainbow

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Meet Roy G. Biv Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The seven basic colors of the rainbow. Throw in black, grey and white. Now you have a Base 10 hardware architecture using optical transistors and interconnects. A Space Odyssey Binary / Octal / Hexadecimal are all fine and dandy. They exist because current hardware architectures are simple binary zeroes and ones. Take a Byte A binary byte is composed of eight bits. 2 8 = 256 Let's say a decimal byte is also composed of eight bits. 10 8 = 100,000,000 That is a 390,625% increase in the amount of information that can be stored within a single byte. Theory of General Relativity In relative terms, what kind of data savings can be achieved by using a Base 10 hardware architecture? A widely used hardware data type is a 32-bit integer. 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 10 10 = 10,000,000,000 There are two data saving components here: Exponent Binary requires 32 bits to represent numbers between zero an

Difficult Recommending AMD GPUs for Ubuntu Desktop

As an unabashed AMD fanboy, it is difficult for me to recommend AMD GPUs for Ubuntu Desktop installations. Not because they perform poorly. The RX 550 I have running Ubuntu 18.04.1 Desktop with open-source amdgpu drivers passes the eye test performance-wise. It certainly feels faster than the NVidia GT 1030 it replaced, but sorry I don't have hard benchmarks to back that assertion up. The problem with AMD GPUs comes down to one simple thing. Downloading their AMDGPU-PRO drivers. From their own website. For over two years now, people have been on the AMD Community boards complaining about their AMDGPU-PRO driver downloads for Ubuntu are corrupted and cannot be extracted. More than two years this has been an issue. And it appears to only be with their Ubuntu drivers as there are zero complaints from Windows / RedHat / CentOS / SUSE users. Only Ubuntu. Here are some of the posts made about downloading corrupted AMDGPU-PRO drivers for Ubuntu Desktop going all the way back to