Microsoft's Cool Quantum Computing Plan Embraces Cryogenic Memory (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader shares a PCWorld report: Microsoft has crazy quantum computing plans: first, it built hardware based on a particle that hasn't even been discovered. Now, it's hoping to co-design super-cool memory for quantum computers. The company is working with Rambus to develop and build prototype computers with memory subsystems that can be cooled at cryogenic temperatures, typically below minus 180 degrees Celsius or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit. Cryogenics goes hand in hand with quantum computers, which promise to be significantly faster than today's PCs and servers and may even eventually replace them. But the systems are notoriously unstable and need to be stored in refrigerators for faster and secure operation. As an example, D-Wave's 2000Q quantum computer needs to be kept significantly cooler than supercomputers so operations don't break down.

Comments

Re:A few corrections

[gweihir]

Indeed. Like most of Quantum-"Computing" these days. Call me again when they can break RSA-300 or so, which was broken by conventional computers quite a while ago. The thing is, the number of entangled qbits seem to have been growing sub-linear with time. May well be that quantum computers scale inverse exponentially with effort, and that would mean somewhere is a border where you just cannot get more and that one seems to be pretty low. There may also be an actual hard boundary that no amount of effort can overcome. Hence, a few hundred qbits may be all that is possible in this universe. That is basically worthless.