from the coming-to-a-desktop-near-you dept.
The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears in the international journal Nature.
"What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.
"We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate -- the central building block of a quantum computer -- and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.
...
The advance represents the final physical component needed to realise the promise of super-powerful silicon quantum computers, which harness the science of the very small -- the strange behaviour of subatomic particles -- to solve computing challenges that are beyond the reach of even today's fastest supercomputers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday October 07 2015, @07:43AM
Crucial Hurdle Overcome
Couldn't they just tunnel through it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by ticho on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:27AM
No, that's wormhole physics, that comes next. (Or maybe after cold fusion?)
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday October 07 2015, @11:06AM
You won't know until you see them at the other end.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:46PM
I thought maybe they were bringing back those 5.25" bigfoots back, actually, and maybe mounting them in a NUC as part of a plan to become relevant again. Maybe cloud storage is an opportunity for the Quantum name, because when the drives fail the data disappears into the ether--just like bigfoot sightings?
Or was it if you observe a Quantum hard drive, your data exists in there/not there state (like if you had pics of Shroedinger's cat) until checkdisk is run, and then the data is for sure lost into the ether.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @09:09AM
D-Wave qubits: 1,152
honest qubits: 2
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @09:29AM
Oh God, is that a Common Core math problem?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @12:21PM
Well, according to Moore's law, in two years we will have the four-qubit quantum computer. And in another two years, we'll have reached a qubyte (8 qubits). In ten years, we will have reached the 64-qubit quantum computer, and in 20 years we will beat the D-wave claims with the 2048-qubit computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday October 07 2015, @01:50PM
Moore's law isn't a relevant curve for quantum computing in the best case scenario. That's the hope of this "game changer" story:
Now that they have two qubits in conventional silicon, they may be able to scale it up directly to hundreds of millions or low billions of qubits. They will probably put out smaller chips of less than a 1000 qubit size to test the implementation of control units and other components needed for a finished product. Once that is complete, it is a straight shot to billions of qubits.
Quantum computing hardware will quickly leverage decades of CMOS scaling. The hardware will be so advanced so quickly that universities and corporations will suddenly have to find applications and programmers for it.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:46PM
Managing decoherence for a billion qubits is very much harder than managing decoherence for two qubits. That's a problem classical computation doesn't face.
Imagine if a single bit error would not just affect that single bit, but all data in the computer. That's roughly what happens in a quantum computer where all the qubits are entangled.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday October 07 2015, @10:57PM
Aside from that, I'd say that you can still create a useful chip with billions of qubits, by making small blocks of entangled qubits and allowing them to function in parallel. For example you could have 2^30 (1 billion) qubits in 2^20 groups of 2^10 (1024) entangled qubits each. Your problem size would be limited I guess, but you could spread out the workload if applicable.
I might be wrong about this, but if you had a billion entangled qubits, would a few decoherent qubits necessarily ruin the whole calculation? Most quantum algorithms output a correct answer with a probability less than 1 and might require multiple repetitions to raise the probability the answer is correct.
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(Score: 2) by jcross on Wednesday October 07 2015, @02:01PM
TFA is short on details, but are these in fact "honest" qubits? I'm guessing so because a logic gate sounds much more like part of a quantum computer than the quantum annealing D-wave is hyping. I'd love to hear some interpretation/speculation from someone with more domain knowledge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @08:40PM
I'm not a domain expert, but I didn't read anything on solving the decoherence problem. I wouldn't hold my breath, and I'm not concerned about public key crypto being broken yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2015, @01:09PM
skynet will hear you!