XFX has prepared its newest "Magnetic Air" series of Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs with hot-swappable fans for the US market, where they were only exclusive to the Chinese region. The company has informed us that the series will be called "Magnetic Air," instead of the previously believed "MagAir." Comprising the XFX Qicksilver Radeon RX 7800 XT Magnetic Air and the XFX Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air, these GPUs are now available for purchase in the US, with an official launch date set for June 18. What sets the Magnetic Air series apart is its unique cooling design, featuring Honeywell PTM 7950 phase-changing thermal pads that offer superior thermal conductivity. The cooling system boasts 216 ultra-thin matrix fins strategically arranged in a high and low structure to optimize airflow, while the heatsink is attached to a vapor chamber for efficient heat dissipation. Additionally, the backplate is crafted from durable aluminium die-cast, ensuring long-lasting performance.

The XFX Qicksilver Radeon RX 7800 XT Magnetic Air is available in both white and black variants, priced at $529.99, while the XFX Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air carries a price tag of $979.99. The most innovative feature of the Magnetic Air series is its swappable fan design, allowing users to customize their cooling setup to suit their specific needs. This level of flexibility is sure to appeal to enthusiasts and overclockers seeking optimal performance from their rigs. Currently, only the black variants of the 7900XTX and 7800XT are in stock, but all Magnetic Air models are expected to be available on the official launch date of June 18 for PC enthusiasts in the United States.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of the RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is now live]

Quantinuum, the world's largest integrated quantum computing company, today unveiled the industry's first quantum computer with 56 trapped-ion qubits. H2-1 has further enhanced its market-leading fidelity and is now impossible for a classical computer to fully simulate.

A joint team from Quantinuum and JPMorgan Chase ran a Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) algorithm, achieving a remarkable 100x improvement over prior industry results from Google in 2019 and setting a new world record for the cross entropy benchmark. H2-1's combination of scale and hardware fidelity makes it difficult for today's most powerful supercomputers and other quantum computing architectures to match this result.

XFX over the weekend rolled out the Radeon RX 7900 XTX Phoenix Nirvana graphics card, the company's new flagship custom-design product based on fastest AMD Radeon GPU you can buy. From the looks of it, the card is China-exclusive, as we haven't seen any updates from the European or North American arms of XFX showcase this card. The Phoenix Nirvana is noticeably larger than the company's current MERC 310, and features a 4-slot design, with a significantly heavier heatsink. The card is 34.6 cm long, 13 cm tall, and is 4 slots thick.

The star attraction with this card is its large aluminium fin-stack heatsink, which features 216 aluminium fins for a total of 62.586 mm² of surface area for heat dissipation; six copper heatpipes, a vapor-chamber base, and 15,000 W/mK Honeywell PTM 7950 phase-changing thermal pad between the vapor-chamber and the GPU. Each of the three 100 mm fans of the XFX RX 7900 XTX Phoenix Nirvana features a fluid-dynamic bearing, turns at speeds of up to 3,200 RPM, pushing 70.08 CFM of airflow, at 4.88 mm H₂O, each. The card is priced at ¥7,899 in China, which converts to roughly $1,090.

With the XMG FUSION 15 and CORE 15, XMG unveils its first 15.3-inch laptops in 16:10 format. The two compact devices, which are very similar except for a few details, differ primarily regarding their CPUs: the FUSION 15 is powered by Intel's Core i9-14900HX or i7-14650HX and either an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 or 4070, while the CORE 15 combines an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS with an RTX 4060. Apart from that, the gaming laptops, which weigh around 2 kg and are 21.9 mm high, offer a WQXGA display with a brightness of 500 nits and an almost entirely aluminium chassis with a clean and elegant design.

The design language of the XMG FUSION 15 (E24) and the XMG CORE 15 (M24) focuses on understated elegance. The laptops share an identical, black anodised and torsion-resistant aluminium chassis. At 342.5 x 245 x 21.9 mm, these two 15.3-inch devices are very compact, while a reduced weight of just 2.0 kg (XMG CORE 15) or 2.1 kg (XMG FUSION 15) offers good portability.

Fault-tolerant quantum computers that offer radical new solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems in medicine, finance and the environment, as well as facilitating a truly widespread use of AI, are driving global interest in quantum technologies. Yet the various timetables that have been established for achieving this paradigm require major breakthroughs and innovations to remain achievable, and none is more pressing than the move from merely physical qubits to those that are fault-tolerant.

In one of the first meaningful steps along this path, scientists from Quantinuum, the world's largest integrated quantum computing company, along with collaborators, have demonstrated the first fault-tolerant method using three logically-encoded qubits on the Quantinuum H1 quantum computer, Powered by Honeywell, to perform a mathematical procedure.

The two leading companies in the quantum computing industry have combined to create Quantinuum, thereby accelerating the development of quantum computing and innovation of quantum technologies in a platform agnostic manner to deliver real-world quantum-enabled solutions for some of the most intractable problems that classical computers have not been able to solve.

Cambridge Quantum, the pioneer in quantum software, operating systems, and cybersecurity, and Honeywell Quantum Solutions, which has built the highest-performing quantum hardware, based on trapped-ion technologies, today announced they have satisfied all of the conditions required to close the business combination and formed the new company, now called Quantinuum.

Honeywell, a multinational conglomerate specializing in the quantum computing field, today announced they have created the world's most advanced quantum computer. Their new solution brings about a quantum computing volume set at 64 - twice the quantum volume of the world's previous most powerful quantum computer, the IBM Raleigh. You might be looking at that 64 quantum volume, wondering what that means - and where did the qubits metric go. Well, the thing with quantum computers is that the number of qubits can't really be looked at as a definite measure of performance - instead, it's just a part of the "quantum volume" calculation, which expresses the final performance of a quantum system.

When you make operations at the quantum level, a myriad of factors come into play that adversely impact performance besides the absolute number of qubits, such as the calculation error rate (ie, how often the system outputs an erroneous answer to a given problem) as well as the qubit connectivity level. Qubit connectivity expresses a relationship between the quantum hardware capabilities of a given machine and the ability of the system to distribute workloads across qubits - sometimes the workloads can only be distributed to two adjacent qubits, other times, it can be distributed to qubits that are more far apart within the system without losing data coherency and without affecting error rates - thus increasing performance and the systems' flexibility towards processing workloads. If you've seen Alex Garland's Devs series on Hulu (and you should; it's great), you can see a would-be-quantum computer and all its intricate connections. Quantum computers really are magnificent crossovers of science, materials engineering, and computing. Of course, the quantum computing arms race means that Honeywell's system will likely be dethroned by quantum volume rather soon.