Google and IBM Believe First Workable Quantum Computer is in Sight (ft.com) 36
IBM and Google report they will build industrial-scale quantum computers containing one million or more qubits by 2030, following IBM's June publication of a quantum computer blueprint addressing previous design gaps and Google's late-2023 breakthrough in scaling error correction.
Current experimental systems contain fewer than 200 qubits. IBM encountered crosstalk interference when scaling its Condor chip to 433 qubits and subsequently adopted low-density parity-check code requiring 90% fewer qubits than Google's surface code method, though this requires longer connections between distant qubits.
Google plans to reduce component costs tenfold to achieve its $1 billion target price for a full-scale machine. Amazon Web Services quantum hardware executive Oskar Painter told FT he estimates useful quantum computers remain 15-30 years away, citing engineering challenges in scaling despite resolved fundamental physics problems.
Current experimental systems contain fewer than 200 qubits. IBM encountered crosstalk interference when scaling its Condor chip to 433 qubits and subsequently adopted low-density parity-check code requiring 90% fewer qubits than Google's surface code method, though this requires longer connections between distant qubits.
Google plans to reduce component costs tenfold to achieve its $1 billion target price for a full-scale machine. Amazon Web Services quantum hardware executive Oskar Painter told FT he estimates useful quantum computers remain 15-30 years away, citing engineering challenges in scaling despite resolved fundamental physics problems.
What else would they claim to believe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would anyone expect them to publish a statement like the above, even if it was their honest opinion?
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"Dear Investors, we sank billions in research on quantum computers, but we do not believe them ever to become workable,
I'm not sure why they would believe that. The number of coherent qubits over time has gone steadily up. See here https://www.statista.com/statistics/993634/quantum-computers-by-number-of-qubits/ [statista.com] Right now, we're in what is sometimes called the noisy intermediate-scale quantum erahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy_intermediate-scale_quantum_era [wikipedia.org] which looks radically different from where we were 20 years ago. We now have in labs all over the world quantum computers with enough qubits that they would have
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And yet, they still can't factor a 2 digit number without cheating. Note that with the cheats employed, a Commodore Vic-20 can do it faster and costs significantly less to buy or operate.
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"Dear Investors, we sank billions in research on quantum computers, but we do not believe them ever to become workable, which is consistent with our success so far. But of course we will keep on trying, so keep investing in us! Thanks for your understanding, yours truly Google & IBM."
You investment should now be considered: "Schodinger's shares".
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"Dear Investors, we sank billions in research on quantum computers, but we do not believe them ever to become workable, which is consistent with our success so far. But of course we will keep on trying, so keep investing in us! Thanks for your understanding, yours truly Google & IBM."
You investment should now be considered: "Schodinger's shares".
Thank you for the first out-loud laugh of the morning. If I had mod points, you'd have earned them.
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Indeed. After > 50 years of expensive R&D, they can factor the number 21 these days: https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
Currently, the try the "Big Lie" approach to obscure that.
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Wow. I thought they'd only factored 15. I need to keep up with the latest news.
This is hitting the level where it's competing with yafu.
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Yep, there have been some drastic advances! When I learned about this stuff first about 40 years ago, they could only factorize 4!
That is, what, an improvement from 2 bits to now 5 bits in 40 years. If they keep up that exponential speedup, it will only take them another 300 years or so to be able to attack 2048 bit keys. If, on the other hand, that speed-up is linear over time, it will take them about 30'000 years to get there. Or worse if the speed-up is inverse-exponential, as it very likely will be give
They would say that, wouldn't they? (Score:4, Insightful)
Say What, Willis? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google aims to get the cost down to $1billion for a full scale machine?
So, if these things get built, they'll be massively more expensive than main frames and they'll be rarer than hen's teeth. But, they're being hyped almost as much as AI.
What a load of crap.
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open science vs corporate R&D (Score:3)
We'd be so much further along if all of the big corporate players in this space (google, IBM, microsoft, amazon, honeywell) could cooperate rather than compete. They are still outpacing us poor shmucks working federal research grants because each one of them can throw bags of money at the problem. But all of their chip designs and fab processes are completely secret. I asked one of the lead google researchers if he could even tell me the dimensions of one of their devices, and he held his fingers a few cm apart and looked like he would get in trouble for revealing that much. Their innovative gap-engineered junctions were a huge leap forward enabling the first beyond-break-even error correction demonstration. But all along IBM has quietly had chips that were somehow not susceptible to the correlated error bursts google had to overcome, and as far as I am aware, it was a happy accident, not a design choice.
If these behemoths could cooperate openly, we'd have functional quantum computers in just a few years, not the few decades that it's going to end up taking. (And for all you skeptics, it is coming. There are huge engineering challenges to solve still, but there is no fundamental barrier.)
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We'd be so much further along if all of the big corporate players in this space (google, IBM, microsoft, amazon, honeywell) could cooperate rather than compete.
This is a fundamental fact that way too many out there refuse to grasp.
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We'd be so much further along if all of the big corporate players in this space (google, IBM, microsoft, amazon, honeywell) could cooperate rather than compete.
This is a fundamental fact that way too many out there refuse to grasp.
I see no evidence that it's true. It's almost always the case that competition pushes progress faster. The only real exceptions are when the competitors are able to keep core elements of their approach secret, which isn't the case here; both IBM and Google researchers are regularly publishing most of the details of what they're doing.
10K logical qubits? (Score:3)
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These are fantasy numbers. The current actual QC factorization record is 21: https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
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So a million physical qubits means 10K or so logical qubits usable (as IBM has mentioned needing around 100 physical qubits for each error corrected logical qubit). If IBM can build a million physical qubit system by 2030, larger ones will no doubt follow. Moving to PQC and deprecating (in 2030) and disallowing (in 2035) RSA 2048 is probably the right recommendations by NIST.
No one should be using RSA now, even ignoring QC. RSA is slow, unwieldy and error-prone. No one who knows what they're doing uses it except in very narrow niches where it has properties that EC doesn't. Every cryptographer and cryptographic security engineer I know (including me) treats the use of RSA in protocol designs as analogous to a "code smell", a strong one. If I see a protocol design that uses RSA, it's an immediate red flag that the designer very likely doesn't know what they're doing and has p
So... (Score:1)
What is a Qubit worth?
What speed does it run at?
Last I checked (it's been a while since I looked up processor specs two days ago)... speed matters... faster processor (or more cores) makes worlds of difference.
So, is a five Qubit computer faster than my 24-core 3.8GHz processor?
If it's a special-usage case thing (a random number generator, or something), it's useless.
If it's used for encryption on your home computer, 'may the Gods have mercy' when the Q computer dies.
The idea of Q computing is fun, but the
Re: So... (Score:3)
However, quantum computing can, in theory, solve certain NP complete problem in polynomial time. The concept of "speed" doesn't translate directly, because some problems that are impossible to solve within the lifetime of the universe, become solvable within a lifetime.
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Yes... but, how fast can it crunch a SETI workunit?
If it's gonna take longer than a day... is it worth it? If it's gonna be so specialized for one particular thing, is it worth it?
While the idea of quantum computing sounds like an awesome thing (closer to Star Trek), if it can't be used for anything beyond random encryption, what's the real purpose?
It'd be cool to have a 20THz computer, but if I can't even play a movie on the thing... what's the point?
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"However, quantum computing can, in theory, solve certain NP complete problem in polynomial time."
If you can solve one NP complete problem in polynomial time, you can solve them all.
Quantum computers can't solve NP complete problems in polynomial time. That is incorrect.
But it can solve some other troublesome problems that can't be solved in polynomial time with a conventional computer.
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"Speed of a P1"? What are you dreaming? It will be less performant than a 1kHz 4 bit MCU. Much less.
Just like fusion... (Score:2)
... it's always 20 years away.
Re: Just like fusion... (Score:3)
Re:Just like fusion... (Score:4, Informative)
Target price: $1Bn... per year (Score:3)
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In the same way that it's possible that the next time I trip, the wind will suddenly align just right and stand me back up unharmed. It's possible. But I'm still going to make sure to tie my shoes.
And fusion! (Score:3)
Market size (Score:2)
It is almost in sight! (Score:2)
Nonsense (Score:2)
Example: The current factorization record for QCs is 35. No, not 35 bit (which would be pathetic after >50 years of research), 35 as in 6 bit. The claims suggests something else entirely, but when you get down to it, that is what you actually find. Hence whatever "workable" means, it does not mean "useful for anything in the real world".
Love the lying! (Score:2)
I mean, this is pretty artistic. "Contain" 1M qbits sounds great but means absolutely nothing. The only thing that matters is "entangled, effective qbits" and then how long they stay entangles during a long, complex calculation. At the same time, the actual factorization record for QCs is 21. That means 15 effective qbits with Shor's algorithm.
I guess QCs will continue to deliver great claims and announcements, but absolutely nothing of real value.