The second quantum revolution

second-tech.com

2 pointsdafer452 comments

I'm continually surprised that these articles on quantum computing never mention D-Wave, who have a working 2000 qubit machine. Sure, it's not a gate model, but it's working and available today, exhibits macroscale quantum effects, and is well on its way to demonstrating quantum advantage on optimization problems.

It's always the same old, 5-qubit useless IBM machine, when production, commercially available quantum machines are actually being built right now. They have a real PR problem when articles like this never mention D-Wave.

D-wave is certainly interesting, but one of the main problems is that no one really knows what's going on. It's not really clear how or if the machine actually performs any calculations beyond what is classically possible. The recent progress is much more robust in this sense, with multiple actors currently moving forward to scale up the number of qubits.

That said, quantum technology is not only about quantum computation. What is happening now is that industry is gaining very detailed control of the production process all the way down to the atomic scale. See for example this (https://phys.org/news/2018-05-dutch-firm-asml-microchip-tech...) article, which mentions how chip manufacturer are about to gain precision that is finer than the atomic scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com