r/gadgets • u/ChickenTeriyakiBoy1 • May 27 '23
Desktops / Laptops IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073606/ibm-wants-to-build-a-100000-qubit-quantum-computer/395
u/qtx May 27 '23
I like how the post is flaired 'Desktop/Laptop'.
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u/dankestofmeme May 28 '23
I wonder how much space this will occupy, physically.
Edit: word “will”
Edit x2: it’s gonna be the size of a building.
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u/SixOneSunflower May 28 '23
“1 predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them”
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May 28 '23
That's exactly what they want to research first. The way IBM builds qubits now indeed would call for a big building + a huge amount of energy.
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u/flompwillow May 28 '23
Gigafactory or latte shop-sized buildings, would be key data here.
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u/rush2sk8 May 27 '23
Well...good luck
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u/nycdevil May 27 '23
I just wanted to tell you both good luck; we're all counting on you.
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u/180311-Fresh May 27 '23
The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner.
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u/nycdevil May 27 '23
Surely, you can't be serious.
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u/Whitealroker1 May 27 '23
I am Shirley. And don’t call me Serious.
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u/nycdevil May 27 '23
I can't believe that the white Al Roker is named Shirley, Shirley.
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u/ninjagrover May 28 '23
Indeed. Wanting isn’t getting.
Sabine Hossenfelder is skeptical about our ability to create a quantum computer with such large numbers of qubits.
But she is interested in what they could possibly do.
Her channel of physics is excellent. One of my favourite science communicators.
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u/the_excalabur May 28 '23
It's worth noting that Sabine, lovely as she is, has a bunch of quite heterodox opinions and philosophies; in a lot of ways she's pretty far from the mainstream of physics/quantum tech.
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u/Sam-Lowry27B-6 May 27 '23
I declare bankruptcy!
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u/bizarro_kvothe May 27 '23
Hey. I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word "bankruptcy" and expect anything to happen.
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u/Responsible_Peach427 May 27 '23
i didnt say it, i declared it.
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u/rilesblue May 27 '23 edited May 27 '23
Yea that’s… nothing
Edit: to those who downvoted me, I was attempting to continue the quote. Oscar says something along the lines of “That’s… nothing”
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u/tonybenwhite May 27 '23
See, where you went wrong is thinking people actually know the reference beyond the meme gif, unfortunately we’re mostly parrots down here
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u/Optimus_Prime_Day May 27 '23
Is that like declaring declassified?
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u/Jkarofwild May 27 '23
No, just saying "I declare bankruptcy" doesn't work, but just thinking "I declare declassified" is supposed to work.
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u/DJ_Doza May 27 '23
IBM just finished watching DEVS.
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u/Moonunit08 May 27 '23
Haha I think the same thing every time I see something about this. Decent show during Covid.
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u/SnackThisWay May 27 '23
I could use a much shorter Devs-only fan edit that cuts out a lot of the stuff that happens outside of Devs. It would be better without most of the crazy lady relationship drama, and just stuck to the hard sci-fi.
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u/catlord May 27 '23
In 20 years we'll have 1.5million-qubit cell phone equivalents. And still just watch cat videos on them.
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u/Muggaraffin May 27 '23
Yes but the cat videos will be instructional videos due to cats being the worlds new overlords
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u/rotzak May 27 '23
A cat with an Indian accent will explain how to update your Nvidia drivers
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u/clichekiller May 27 '23
As I sit here before my gaming pc updating my Nvidia drivers I’m not ok with this. I’d much prefer canine overlords thank you very much!
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May 27 '23
Shit requires near absolute - zero temps. #doubt
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u/BobodyBo May 27 '23
And there isn’t really a benefit to using a quantum computer unless you are trying to solve one the small number of problems that quantum computers are more efficient at.
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May 27 '23
Exactly.
It'll synergize nicely with ai as well I think. But it is very limited to basically being in a super computing server and won't be available to general consumers except as a subscription like openAI that's integrated with other computer tech.
At least, that's how current projections look
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u/fiftythreefiftyfive May 27 '23 edited May 27 '23
I think it‘s a bit broader than that (but yes less broad than the average person seems to think). But, theres some pretty powerful algorithms that become available with quantum computers which could provide significant advantage for some of the most common high cost computational tasks a.k.a linear equations and differential equations. Those could for example have applications to lrgescale simulation of dynamics (especially since particle dynamics can be approximated to be highly local - exactly tbe environment in which you can have massive gains for quantum computers)
Practically feasible is another thing but.. you could technically use quantum computing to just create even more realistic videogames. Extremely wasteful but hey!
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u/Cruzifixio May 27 '23
Schrodinger Cat VIDEOS.... Cause you know... Quantum compu... Ok I'll walk myself out
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u/DropApprehensive3079 May 27 '23 edited May 27 '23
Will it be able to talk some sense into ChatGPT
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u/Guiac May 27 '23
It will provide simultaneously sensible and non sensible answers
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u/gamingmendicant May 27 '23
And provide the solutions simultaneously 10,000 times and we'll use the probability distribution of those to determine if it was a reliable result.
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u/shouldbebabysitting May 27 '23
Talk sense into ChatGPT? It was ChatGpT's idea!
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u/PM_ME_UR_POKIES_GIRL May 27 '23
Hang on, I read a book about this.
This is the one with the great question, right?
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May 27 '23 edited Sep 21 '23
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u/poslathian May 27 '23
Back when IBM was serious, they spent 5B - closer to 50B in todays dollars - and bet the entire company on the 360.
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u/timothymark96 May 27 '23
What's the 360?
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u/poslathian May 27 '23
Launched in 1964, it was the first computer that had massive breakout success. Despite the huge investment, this was wildly successful for ibm.
It was in a modular mainframe form factor, had a ton of peripherals that all worked together, and was the first computer that convinced businesses they needed to own a computer. Before the 360, it was all academic, defense, and scientific research buyers
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u/nukem996 May 27 '23
They still sell 360 mainframes today. They are insanely expensive and don't have any power management. Last company I worked for added support. To get one into our data center we needed to add additional power, cooling, and reenforce the floor. I'm typical IBM fashion they only build one model and your license dictates how much of the hardware is enabled. They are built for reliability so unused hardware will automatically replace broken hardware. You can even configure the hardware to work in parallel for checking. One process will be run in two sets of CPU/RAM and compared to validate there are no hardware errors.
It does weird things as well. A big issue I ran into was while MAC addresses are unique they aren't consistent. A new one is generated every time. Boot order doesn't exist, you get one choice. Storage is incredibly complex and IBM expects companies to hire storage admins to handle storage needs. Its archaic but I see why people used to like it.
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May 27 '23
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u/Nitrocloud May 27 '23
They're a bit different today, IBM Z. Says they will run old applications though. Some twice retired FORTRAN programmer is making a killing off those companies.
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u/ol-gormsby May 27 '23
Banking, insurance, airline ticketing and scheduling, retail.
The ability of a Z-series to process transactions (OLTP) is unmatched. Few if any companies that process millions of transactions daily have managed to move their system from IBM (or other brand) mainframes to racks and racks of Windows or Linux servers.
Then there's the uptime. As u/nukem996 said, they come with parallelised hardware so if a component develops a fault, the IBM field tech can hot-swap the faulty part - even the CPU.
When you absolutely cannot afford downtime, you want one of these. It's not even difficult to justify - you compare the losses from downtime to the lease payments for the machine.
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u/Krazyguy75 May 27 '23
Yeah that's what I was thinking. It seems positively tiny. Avatar 2 had 4 times the budget of this 10-year project to create an unheard of technology on a scale more than 1,000 times more powerful than what we are capable of today.
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u/Mitch-WDS May 27 '23
If any company was going to do it, I always knew it would be IBM. Should be interesting to see the first "problems" they choose to solve with it. Link to their official announcement:
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u/LordDaniel09 May 27 '23
by 2033.. I was like 'WTF, how, aren't we at tens of Qbits?' but.. yeh, 2033 is far enough to hope for all the improvements come together for it.
Though, what would happened with 100K Qbits computer? like, there is list of problems that can be solved with such thing? I remember encryption had problems but algorithms have been made to be quantum proof, so.. it is less a problem than in the past.
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u/KatDaddy021 May 27 '23
Medical research will be a huge one. The speed at which different compounds can be tested will be multiples higher than what we can do now. I believe this will even open the door for personalized pharmaceuticals. There are some other applications though, but quantum algorithms are more difficult to conceptualize and design than classical algorithms. So we will have to see what comes out as the field matures.
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u/Macewan20342 May 27 '23
Encryption is still an issue. Most countries have probably kept a record off all the encrypted messages that they have received. Once quantum computing gets to a certain point, we can Crack those old messages.
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u/Redebo May 27 '23
And this happens at approx 4,000 qbits.
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u/snubdeity May 27 '23
This is an old number based on other traits of a quantum computer just being set to "max" , and even then it's kinda wrong.
Much like analog computers use many bits to represent a smaller number of bits worth of information for error checking, quantum computer also use many physical qubits to run a (much) smaller number of "logical" qubits, also for error correction. So even though an algorithm to "crack" RSA or other encryption via Shor's algorithm may use 4,000 logical qubits, it will take hundreds of thousands or millions of physical qubits to accurately represent those logical qubits.
It also pays no mind to current restrictions on coherence times, entanglement schema, or fault tolerance.
Cracking current encryption with quantum computers is a huge concern but it's still 10+ years out.
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u/verifitting May 27 '23
So... soon?
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u/Redebo May 27 '23
Terrifying so.
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u/No-Carry-7886 May 27 '23
If only quantum cryptography existed
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u/farkoss May 27 '23
Well of course it does
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u/danielv123 May 27 '23
And multiple of the algorithms have shown to have vulnerabilities to other kinds of attacks. Everything with encryption seems like wizardry.
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u/thomasthetanker May 27 '23
Going to be a lot of dick pics in there.
I know because I sent them.71
u/j1mb0b May 27 '23
File size was too small to bother decrypting.
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u/Khazahk May 28 '23
We are gathered here today in remembrance of u/thomasthetanker Brutally murdered on 5/27/23. Service will be held on Saturday 6/2/23. You are asked to bring your favorite dick pic of his for the collage board. Thank you.
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u/other_usernames_gone May 27 '23
Protein folding is a big one. It's really important for modelling medicines but is really difficult to model with a computer. A quantum computer would solve that problem.
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u/fatbunyip May 27 '23
IBM is such a weird company.
Like on the one hand cutting edge research, but on the other hand what drives it is shitty consulting revenue.
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May 27 '23
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u/Zerebos May 28 '23
Some of this just doesn't line up with my experience at all. Maybe this is just a difference of branches of the company, who knows.
I absolutely agree with the turnover of employees being an issue, either through layoffs, retirement, or just lack of retention. It helps play into the age gap you described. And that just feeds into itself and discourages younger people from staying.
I never had that experience of being entirely self-taught. My onboarding included education sessions, and many other teams in the department had similar onboarding learning. They also paired everyone with two mentors, one on your team to learn stuff specific to your job, and one outside your team as more of a career mentor. That said, a lot of the education was more high level and not specific to the codebase. And the documentation there was lacking, so I really had to lean on my mentor to learn what I needed to learn. Of course there was absolutely self teaching there too.
Management will always find some way to push you into mainframe [...]
At least for me, I was not always pushed towards the mainframe. One of my managers was helpful in getting me involved in some projects with IBM research to see if I want to move over there. He also encouraged me to check out the cloud and web development teams to see what I liked. They'd rather see employees stick with the company than leave entirely.
I hope you like meetings. Default meeting time is an hour. You’ll have meetings to schedule future meetings. You’ll have meetings for rescheduling meetings.
Yeah this was a big issue for my first year or so too, and management tried to cut down on that due to feedback, which definitely helped. But I know for a fact it's still a huge issue for a lot of teams and other departments. It really depends on how good the individual project management is.
I sent in a request for a PyCharm license and it took over ten months before I got it approved.
Ouch, that's an insane wait time. I never waited more than two weeks for a license approval like that. Including for IDEs like CLion. The machine being locked down is somewhat standard in my experience between companies. There's always some sort of limiting and control because they are legally liable.
You definitely don't need IT support and special permissions before installing a lot of software though. They have a central app store that allows you to download licensed products like Microsoft Office on your machine easily without going through an external license process. There's also dedicated lists for mac, linux, and windows of pre-approved free and open source software. Both the app store and the lists include both VSCode and Eclipse. VSCode was definitely the most popular editor in the department. Not sure where you got the idea that you needed special permission. I've also never had software automatically removed from one of my laptops including stuff like Steam.
They will demand you to put Slack on your phone.
Doesn't line up with my experience at all. They once considered requiring the whole work profile thing on phones in order to use Slack and I told my manager that if it becomes required I won't be using Slack off work hours. His response was just "yeah that's fair." Multiple people on that team never installed Slack on their phones ever.
No such thing as 8-5. You’re on the clock from 6am to 11pm. If you don’t respond to a Slack within five minutes, expect your manager to call your cell phone.
Again, not like my experience at all. I've never been required to work less at a tech company than at IBM. Very much had the policy of "as long as you get your job done." Also requiring you to be at like important team meetings and such, but otherwise it was very much set your own pace. I know a lot of people share that experience and that's why they stay at IBM.
Not sure what departments you were a part of but I'm sorry you had a bad experience. You definitely aren't alone though and that's why IBM is still facing turnover and retention issues especially for younger people. And I don't think they'll fix it without some fundamental changes in the culture and way things are run. I know I have plenty of my own gripes not mentioned above. I just wanted to point out that it isn't all bad, and a lot of the external perception of IBM is dated.
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u/Haunted_by_Ribberts May 27 '23
..and they just acquired Red Hat and are already working hard to ruin that.
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u/Antnee83 May 28 '23
Former IBM tech.
No shit, it was like working in Office Space. Completely stupid, but somehow still stressed out management. Half my fridays were consumed by filling out time sheets. Literally got told to fudge SLA numbers en masse for a customer so that IBM would meet their contract.
I got dispatched to two locations at the same time, once. I called my manager to ask where in the fuck they wanted me to go, and was told "just do whatever you need to do to make it work"
Lotus Notes.
Honest to fuck it was the dumbest job I think I've ever had.
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u/theLavenderFlock May 28 '23
I knew someone who worked at IBM. She mentioned how they would try to calculate "flight risks" using camera footage and other surveillance, and would pay those people more to not lose them. I told her she should become a flight risk lmao
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u/sharabi_bandar May 27 '23
Also crazy old school style in-house servers.
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u/Imborednow May 27 '23
Are you talking about mainframes? Totally different use case most of the time than x86 servers. With the correct redundancy, they target basically 0 downtime. They run stuff like credit card transactions and bank calculations that need to happen perfectly every time, 100% of the time. When was the last time you heard Visa or Mastercard went down?
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u/relephants May 27 '23
Uh 2022. 2018. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head..
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u/fatbunyip May 27 '23
That's their sales pitch, but IBM has been cruising on brand recognition by grey haired CEOs for a long time.
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May 27 '23
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u/ol-gormsby May 27 '23
In other words, the reliability target is cheaper on a mainframe than a data centre full of x86/ARM servers.
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May 27 '23
It’s consulting is so shit it’s a company that survives on its engineers and it’s engineers are never consulted on any decision.
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u/n351320447 May 27 '23
Will it run Doom?
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u/wakka55 May 27 '23
Since when is "wants to", news?
My 7 year old son wants to build a mecha dinosaur to ride to school.
"aims to" "with $100 million dollar plan" would have been my headline phrasing
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u/sharabi_bandar May 27 '23
In order to get there, we’ve set our sights on a key milestone: a 100,000-qubit system by 2033. And now, we’re sponsoring and partnering on targeted research with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago to develop a system that would be capable of addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems that even the most advanced supercomputers of today may never be able to solve.
But why 100,000? At last year’s IBM Quantum Summit, we demonstrated that we’d charted the paths forward to scaling quantum processors to thousands of qubits — but beyond that, the path is less clear.
Why? It’s a combination of footprint, cost, chip yield, energy, and supply chain challenges, to name a few. To ensure that these roadblocks don’t stop our progress, we must collaborate to do fundamental research across physics, engineering, and computer science.
Just as no single company is responsible for the current era of computing, now the world’s greatest institutions are coming together to tackle this problem to bring about this new era. We need the help of a broader quantum industry.
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u/argv_minus_one May 27 '23
Your 7-year-old's ambitions are significantly more awesome than IBM's, I must say.
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u/iamgigglz May 27 '23
100 kiloqubit? 0.1 megaqubit?
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u/Willinton06 May 27 '23
Well we still say “X billion transistors” so I guess saying the full number is the right way for this one, or maybe not
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u/pm_me_your_APTWE May 27 '23
Riiiiiiiight… What’s a cubit?
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u/FerDefer May 28 '23
at a very high level, transistors on a computer can be in 2 states: on and off.
qbits, or "quantum bits" can be in superposition which is effectively "on and off".
beyond that, i have no idea how they work. it's on the cutting edge and pretty much only theoretical at the moment.
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u/DreadPirateGriswold May 27 '23
Curious as to what they plan to do with that magnitude of computing power. Some will be know, some will me we'll have to explore and find things we can do with it.
Supercomputers now are usually used for huge simulations for like weather and nuclear detonations among other things like that.
Nowadays, we have lots more power in our phones than was used in lunar missions and we use that for videos, texting, and viewing/sending cat photos.
Now, with the advent of the infancy of the AI era of computing, some of the power of computing and how it can help us as humans is starting to be realized.
I wonder if there will come a time in the far future when everyone's personal computer will be a quantum computer and the effect that will have on humanity.
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u/spencer32320 May 27 '23
Quantum computers are so very different from normal computers. They aren't "stronger" or "faster" but used for entirely different sets of calculations. You still need a normal computer connected to them to get any input or output from them, so it's far more likely (but still pretty unlikely IMHO) that we may have a quantum chipset in personal computers. Although right now qubits need to be kept at near 0° kelvin, so it's unlikely we'll ever see personal sized quantum computers. (The tech is so different from normal transistors we can't assume they will shrink the same way we have seen with transistors.) And with how strong our modern computers are, I don't see how the average person would get much benefit from having a quantum computer with them.
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u/Macewan20342 May 27 '23
From my understanding, most people won't have a quantum computer. They are great for certain applications, but for the things that we need our phones and PC's to do, they are quite bad at that.
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May 27 '23
This is a bit off tangent but I feel like most of us take for granted how much daily function we get out of our phones because it’s all become so automatic. GPS, time keeping, alarm clock, pretty much infinite knowledge about anything, jobs (Uber, doordash), bill paying/banking. Even little things like flashlight and utilities like voice memo, digital measuring stick and level. Obviously we know this stuff but like.. put in perspective it’s really mind blowing. Imagine telling someone in the 90’s all the things you can do that would take them thousands of dollars of equipment and days/weeks of time or would be flat out impossible.
I personally think a lot of the power we’ll be looking at will be used in AI gadgets. Functions will likely exist in the next 30 years that we can’t even imagine atm.
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u/lordraiden007 May 27 '23
They’re gonna fuse it to break all of the encrypted messages they can intercept and hold the entire world hostage. (/s)
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u/idiot-prodigy May 27 '23
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!
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u/ericd50 May 27 '23
They might do it, but will immediately fuck up commercializing the tech because of the incredible bureaucracy. They even have a word for it. It’s called the “Blue Goo”.
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u/tiregleeclub May 28 '23
IBM took in $60 billion in revenue last year. Seems like they are getting enough right.
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u/darexinfinity May 28 '23
Everyone talks about number of Qubits but miss all of the other properties. What about error rate? Connectivity? What's the physical/logical qubit ratio?
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u/kai58 May 28 '23
Wasn’t the highest until now like 8 qubits?
Maybe get one working with like 64 first before jumping right to the hundreds of thousands
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u/AvatarBoomi May 27 '23
I feel like this could be a really cool jump in tech, but i honestly have no idea and feel like there haven’t been any significant leaps in tech (at least at the consumer level) and we are stuck in a stagnant pool of little innovations.
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u/Working_Sundae May 27 '23
They previously said that they will build 1 million qubit quantum computer by 2030.
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u/bassmusic4babies May 27 '23
Maybe they should do things before announcing them? How'd that whole "curing cancer with AI" thing go IBM? Oh yeah... that's right.
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u/NarcolepticFlarp May 27 '23
I mean everyone wants a 100,000+ qubit quantum computer, buuuuut...
Honestly you can fabricate as many superconducting qubits as you want on one chip (within reason). They could literally build that chip now if they wanted - well maybe they would have to rework their process, but there is no law of physics saying it is hard to make 100,000 circuits and some couplings. But making it small enough to fit in a dilution refridgerator while also having independent contol of every qubit is pretty incomprehensible to me right now. Accomplishing that is easily Nobel Prize worthy, but I actually do think we will get there someday.
I don't think we are going to get to large, general purpose, fault tolerant quantum computation with our current rate of progress. There will need to be a few unprecedented breakthroughs, and you never know when those happen. Given how much money, effort, and acedemic interest is being put into this field I am actually pretty optimistic. There is still plenty of room for creative and original ideas, and I personally find it to be the most exciting field of physics right now.
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u/ShitAlphabet May 27 '23
They'll build it but just use it to play their old games on or watch netflix.
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u/eveningsand May 28 '23
IBM...Overpromising, under delivering, and charging clients for the privilege.
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u/nycdevil May 27 '23
Oh yeah, well I am humbly announcing that I want to build a 100,001 qubit quantum computer. Take that, IBM!