Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

IBM Fellow Emeritus Richard Garwin Passes Away at 97

2025-05-17

Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus and longtime advisor to U.S. presidents, passed away at age 97. His seven-decade career saw him significantly impact the development of MRI machines, laser printers, touchscreens, and even the hydrogen bomb. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Science and the Medal of Freedom, Garwin's contributions to science and government spanned decades, influencing technologies that shape our daily lives. His 41 years at IBM yielded 47 patents and over 500 research papers.

IBM's Bamba: Outpacing Transformers on Long Sequences

2025-04-29

The transformer architecture powering today's LLMs, while effective, suffers from a quadratic bottleneck in longer conversations. IBM's open-sourced Bamba model tackles this by cleverly combining state-space models (SSMs) with transformers. Bamba significantly reduces memory requirements, resulting in at least double the speed of comparable transformers while maintaining accuracy. Trained on trillions of tokens, Bamba is poised to handle conversations with millions of tokens and potentially run up to five times faster with further optimizations.

IBM Breakthrough: Beyond Copper Interconnects for Future CMOS Nodes

2024-12-16

IBM researchers presented two papers at the 2024 IEDM conference on back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect technology, showcasing advancements in advanced interconnect solutions. The first paper explored improvements and future directions for copper interconnect technology, while the second (co-authored with Samsung) introduced a post-copper alternative utilizing an advanced low-k dielectric (ALK) material and rhodium (Rh). This new technology significantly enhances performance and reliability, reducing resistance and capacitance, and addressing reliability challenges faced by traditional copper interconnects at 24nm and below. This research paves the way for future CMOS node chip manufacturing and provides crucial support for the continued development of high-performance, low-power logic integrated circuits.