I'm starting to get some fatigue about quantum computer news, and I just dismiss them now. If there really is a valuable breakthrough, everyone will be talking about it for months non-stop so I won't miss it.
IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
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Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#12> IBM Quantum System Two is designed to work with IBM's future 433-qubit and 1,121 qubit processors. what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?
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Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#13Interesting that the number of qubits is approximately doubling every year according to the article.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#14As someone who knows little about quantum computing, what is the significance of 127-qubits? (as opposed to classical computing's 128 bits, as a reference)
As someone who is very much a lay person, my understanding is the qubitsness of a quantum computer is closer to the ram capacity of a classical computer than anything
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#15> IBM Quantum System Two is designed to work with IBM's future 433-qubit and 1,121 qubit processors. what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?
Kinda depends on what you want to use it for. If you want to simulate a physical system then you need at least as many qubits as the system has (and an understanding that such a simulation will have terrible noise). If you want to do something “useful” like run Shor’s algorithm to factor large encryption keys then it would take millions of qubits and quantum error correction.
To me the significance of this kind of increase in number of qubits is that many detractors of quantum computing had argued we’d never even reach this point, so I am slightly more optimistic that we’ll eventually reach the scale required for reliable abstract computations.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#16>'Eagle' is IBM's first quantum processor developed and deployed to contain more than 100 operational and connected qubits. It follows IBM's 65-qubit 'Hummingbird' processor unveiled in 2020 and the 27-qubit 'Falcon' processor unveiled in 2019.
I guess I missed last years announcement of the 65 qubit one.
So okay we have a 127 qubit machine, what did they do with it afterwards?
The Q3 financials were released so this article can't have been released to pump up the stock price.
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#17Will this system be finally able to factor number 35 using Shor? IBM tried and failed in 2019
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#18> IBM Quantum System Two is designed to work with IBM's future 433-qubit and 1,121 qubit processors. what's the smallest useful (as in, 'non-toy', or maybe 'worth buying time on') quantum computer?
If you are a researcher from another field that just wants to contract out the computation of a numerical solution to some chemistry problem infeasible on a classical supercomputer, a million "physical" qubits is a fairly reasonable guestimate. If you are a quantum computation person developing near term applications, you probably would already start getting excited with a 100 (sufficiently long-lived) qubits. The "s…
Is it accurate to say the primary use of this is likely to design further quantum computers?
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#19>'Eagle' is IBM's first quantum processor developed and deployed to contain more than 100 operational and connected qubits. It follows IBM's 65-qubit 'Hummingbird' processor unveiled in 2020 and the 27-qubit 'Falcon' processor unveiled in 2019. I guess I missed last years announcement of the 65 qubit one. So okay we have a 127 qubit machine, what did they do with it afterwards? The Q3 financials were released so this…
In the months after such an announcement you can expect articles with various attempts at an application to pop up on arxiv. I am saying "attempts at an application", not because the papers are not impressive, rather because the devices are still too small and noisy to excite anyone but researchers in the field. As a researcher in the field I am certainly very excited, because the figure of merit I care about have been drastically improved and this reinforced my belief that we will have a device solving classically-infeasible chemistry simulations soon (anything between 5 and 15 year ;)
Re: IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor
#20surprisingly not a word about quantum supremacy
> It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer.
I mean, that was practically already the case with the Google Sycamore processor. IBM claimed that they could simulate the 53-qubit circuit in something like 24 hours on a supercomputer (with a bunch of bespoke optimizations), but a 54-qubit version would have been completely classically intractable. We didn’t need to get to 100+ qubits, and those came out before now.