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posted by chromas on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-does-it-have-rtx? dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:52PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:52PM (#784543) Journal

    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.
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