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IBM unveils its first commercial quantum computer
At CES, IBM today announced its first commercial quantum computer for use outside of the lab. The 20-qubit system combines into a single package the quantum and classical computing parts it takes to use a machine like this for research and business applications. That package, the IBM Q system, is still huge, of course, but it includes everything a company would need to get started with its quantum computing experiments, including all the machinery necessary to cool the quantum computing hardware.
While IBM describes it as the first fully integrated universal quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use, it's worth stressing that a 20-qubit machine is nowhere near powerful enough for most of the commercial applications that people envision for a quantum computer with more qubits — and qubits that are useful for more than 100 microseconds. It's no surprise then, that IBM stresses that this is a first attempt and that the systems are "designed to one day tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle." Right now, we're not quite there yet, but the company also notes that these systems are upgradable (and easy to maintain).
Quantum computers are real things, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:27AM (3 children)
Wouldn't like to do business or science on either of those, actually. :)
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:49AM (1 child)
I remember upgrading the memory in Trash 80s in high school, model IIIs I think it was. Good times.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:52PM
I remember having someone who worked at Intel volunteered to install the chips to raise my TRS-80 Model III from 16K to 48K to support the two new Seagate 5 1/4 inch drives I'd gotten. Been playing around with Sharp 80 lately to both remember the stuff I spent hours and hours doing and explore a couple of titles I always wanted but couldn't afford.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:47PM
TRS-80s had passed the threshold to usefulness in small-ish office settings, mostly as word processors and database interfaces. ENIAC was more of use to very large institutions.
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