Monday, January 14, 2019

IBM announces quantum computer

ExtremeTech reports:
At CES 2019, IBM Research has made what it hopes is a big step in that direction with what it calls the “first fully-integrated commercial quantum computer,” the Q System One. ...

IBM will be adding the Q System One to its arsenal of cloud-accessible quantum computers, first at its existing quantum data center, and at a new one planned for Poughkeepsie, New York. So for those who aren’t Fortune 500 companies with a budget to purchase their own (IBM hasn’t announced a price for the unit, but if you have to ask…), they’ll be able to make use of one. The current version reportedly “only” supports 20 Qubits, so the breakthrough isn’t in processing power compared with other research models, but instead in reliability and industrial design suitable for use in commercial environments.
This computer will be outperformed by your cell phone.

If the computer could actually do anything useful or have any performance advantage, you can be sure that IBM would be bragging about it. If they could achieve quantum supremacy, there would be academic papers and lobbying for a Nobel Prize.

6 comments:

  1. >> ``This computer will be outperformed by your cell phone.''

    No, your example is not very fitting. ... Even just one program running in the background on a cell-phone would be far more powerful to beat this QC. For that matter, even just an electronic hand calculator might be enough. After all, these are binary qubits, and 2^20 means just 1 mega-states, right?

    Even the original version of Lotus-1-2-3 running on PCs without enough memory to have the undo feature enabled, would have been more powerful, I guess. [https://goughlui.com/2014/10/04/tech-flashback-lotus-1-2-3-for-windows-version-1-1-1992/].

    After all, realize, all these 1 Mega-states are just binary ones; i.e., they require 1 Mega-bit of memory, not 1 Mega-byte. That is to say, the memory requirements here are lower than what a 286 _without_ extended memory would come with!

    ...They don't even seem to know for sure, any more, that what they are doing is pure hyping, unadulterated with any concern for any comparisons grounded in facts.

    --Ajit

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    1. Especially if you used Kolibri. LOL
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPtsi5xorPw

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  2. Let's cut to the chase: How are they going to walk back their own hype? They can't possibly deliver. It's like watching the air leak out of the LHC delusion balloon all over again.

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  3. Amazingly stupid. Like they need to be bleeding money.

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  4. I'm still waiting for their 50 qubit machine to work.

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    1. I'm waiting for their 400 qubit machine, which will come into conflict with the cosmological information bound implied by the holographic principle. Yep, it's that absurd.

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