U of Michigan creates first Quantum Microchip

zigziggityzoo writes "According to this article, The University of Michigan has created the first Quantum Microchip, which could eventually lead to the first instance of Quantum Computing ever." The bad news? We won't be seeing any notebooks or handhelds with quantum chips in the near future.

Comments

Here's a Question for you:

[SnoopJeDi]

From TFA:

Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.

Any particular reason why? I mean, bits are bits, are they not? Or is this saying a game architechture couldn't take advantage of a qubit?

The Power of Quantum Computers is a good insight into just why this is a good system for factorization, and thus, breaking the stuffing out of encryption systems.

Re:But will it run Linux?

[Craigj0]

Actually for some people there are reasons to move beyond 64 bits besides address space. There are a lot of processors that are used in DSP that work on >64 bit intergers. However for a general purpose machine proccessing of large intergers is probably better off in specialised units like altivec.
As a side note current 64 bit processors only actually can access about 40-45 bits of address space since all those extra pins cost money and are unlikely to be used.

First Ever? It's been done before!

[ironwill96]

I seem to recall that an article was posted on /. a few months ago about this as found here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/ 07/1241216

And here is the company's webpage: http://atomchip.com/_wsn/page5.html

See! Proof that Quantum-Optical computing has already been done!

Ok, so maybe this would be the first non-vaporware quantum chip...