Massively^™

When I see the terms "quantum shift" or "quantum leap", I immediately think "the smallest possible discrete motion that can exist" -- basically because that's what we were taught in high-school all those decades ago.

Cisco is announcing a "quantum shift in networking", with a short machinima video (it's only around 9 or 10 seconds long, and contains no romance, explosions or Linkin Park), and an launch event in Second Life.

Cisco's Quantum flow processor is (we believe) a 40-core beast that can handle 160 threads and 49 billion transactions per second. While that's a very impressive workload specification, we don't believe the processor actually uses any quantum computing technology -- which makes the whole "quantum shift in networking" seem like dubious marketing on two fronts.

Nevertheless, there will be a launch event for the processor in Second Life on Cisco Systems' island on Tuesday, 4 March at 9 AM SLT (US Pacific).