Everyone is waiting for real gaming graphics cards of the Arc line from Intel, but the company is in no hurry. But today, the range of Intel video cards has been replenished with two discrete models at once – Arc Pro A40 and Arc Pro A50. As the name suggests, they are designed for professional use. However, the characteristics are modest, so this most professional application will be limited.

Both models have 6GB of GDDR6 memory, support real-time ray tracing and AV1 hardware encoding, and feature four Mini DP 1.4 ports. Arc Pro A40 has a peak consumption of 50 W, this card is a single-slot version, Arc Pro A50 is a dual-slot version, and its peak consumption is 75 W. Performance in the first case is 3.5 TFLOPS with single precision, in the second – 4.8 TFLOPS. For comparison, the performance of the old Radeon HD 6970 (it came out at the end of 2010) is 2.7 TFLOPS.

Together with discrete solutions, the Intel Arc Pro A30M mobile GPU is also presented – it is in many ways similar to the Arc Pro A40, only there is less memory (only 4 GB GDDR) and the power consumption level is adjustable – from 35 to 50 watts. The new Intel GPUs will appear in off-the-shelf products later this year.

Japanese physicists have created a two-qubit quantum processor with a record high speed. This was reported by the press service of the National Institute of Natural Sciences of Japan (National Institute of Natural Sciences – NINS). A group of scientists led by Professor Kenji Omori has created a processor based on Rydberg atoms. These particles play the role of qubits – quantum analogues of ordinary bits. This development was based on atoms of rubidium-87, cooled to near absolute zero and located at a distance of one micron from each other.

The last electron of such an atom is moved a long distance from the nucleus with the help of special pulses of laser radiation – ultrashort, but very powerful. Such pulses transfer neighboring atoms to the Rydberg state, make them interact and participate in the calculation of logical operations. As a result, the processor spends only 6.5 nanoseconds per operation, which is about a hundred times faster than previously achieved on other quantum computers based on cold atoms.

An important factor is the ability of the Japanese development to circumvent some of the limitations that exist for quantum computers. The accuracy of the calculations of quantum processors reduce noise from the external environment and the operating laser. But in this case, one logical operation is performed approximately two orders of magnitude faster than noise occurs in the operation of qubits. In theory, this allows you to ignore their effect on the computer. According to scientists, the new development will lead to the creation of quantum computers capable of performing hundreds of millions of operations per second.

AsRock recently introduced its new Challenger ITX graphics card based on the Arc A380 graphics chip. And now, without postponing the matter indefinitely, I made a review on it.

According to the manufacturer, this is a factory overclocked card with a GPU clock speed of 2250 MHz. However, in real tests it came out. For example, in the Furmark stress test, it reaches 2300 MHz, and in games – 2450 MHz.

Under full load, the fan speed reaches 1683 rpm and the chip temperature is 85°C. The power of the board, according to Furmark, is 54.9 W, which is less than the reference version of the Arc A380, where the TDP is 75 W.

In addition to benchmarks, ASRock has also tested the performance of several games, including popular AAA titles and modern DirectX12 API games. Testing was conducted at 1080p resolution.

The results are:

• League of Legends (high quality): 166.9 FPS.
• CS:GO (high quality): 160.1 FPS
• DOTA2 (high quality): 146.2 FPS
• APEX Legends (medium quality): 91.5 fps
• PUBG (low quality: 83.1 fps)
• Eternal Calamity (medium quality): 62.3 fps
• The Division 2 (high quality): 53 fps
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (high quality): 56 fps
• Cyberpunk 2077 (medium quality): 47.51 fps
• Gears of War 5 (high quality): 63.1 fps
• Watch Dogs: Legion (high quality): 49 fps

Earlier it was reported that PCs with A380 graphics cards will soon appear in Europe.