Only 999,951 to go…

Hey all, we took a brief hiatus for the holidays, but now we’re back and raring to dive into some quantum computing!

Let’s start things off with a short story on some news that was announced in the quantum world earlier this week:

Intel recently announced a breakthrough in their quantum computing research. They presented the 49-qubit Tangle Lake at CES this week.

Ok, so every breakthrough in quantum computing, every single additional qubit that can be added to a computer is a good thing, right?

I, for one, am always excited about new things in quantum.

The Tangle Lake represents a huge leap for Intel, up from 17 qubits a few months ago.

It is widely speculated in the field that one would need a chip that has one million qubits to do anything meaningful on a quantum computer.

Let’s think about that for a sec. 1,000,000 qubits. Intel has 49. It sounds like a long way to go. However, you also have to remember that Intel increased from 13 to 49 qubits in the space of 3 months. That’s a rate of growth of 350% per quarter year.

Obviously, it is unreasonable to assume that this rate of growth can be sustained, but let’s indulge for a minute,

If Intel were somehow able to sustain this rate of growth, they could have a million qubit chip in just under 2 and a half years

Now, again, its pretty unrealistic to assume that kind of constant growth. In fact, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that it would realistically take closer to seven more years to achieve anything close to that number of qubits.

Still, seven years is not that far off.

And we can still dream…