We’re one step closer to QUANTUM COMPUTING!!
“Quantum computing has been threatening to kill off traditional digital computing for a long time now, with various scientific journals hailing its approach. Well, perhaps a few years earlier than we expected, the world has seen the first demonstration of a commercial grade quantum computer in action.
A quick primer: quantum computers don’t rely on bits to structure data. Instead, they work by assuming that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent data structures. Rather than bits, these quantum data structures are called qubits. Since quantum computers deal with such tiny, tiny measurements and nuances – the behaviour of matter and energy at the subatomic scale – the potential for computing power is absolutely massive.
At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what Wikipedia says.
DWave Systems is a Canadian company, and they’ve built working hardware that computes at a quantum level. They’re running 16-bit qubit computations at the moment, but hope to expand that to 32-qubit by the end of the year.
To work, the hardware has to be chilled down to -273 degrees centigrade. That’s colder than outer space, and would make for a pretty decent Core 2 Duo overclock, we suspect.
“D-Wave’s breakthrough in quantum technology represents a substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable. Digital technology stands to reap the benefits of enhanced performance and broader application,” said Herb Martin, chief executive officer, according to DailyTech.
Because of the massive scale that quantum physics operates on, quantum computers are thought to be perfect for solving problems that are simply to great for traditional computers to operate on, such as life sciences and theoretical physics. In theory, a single quantum computer should be multiple times more powerful than the fastest supercomputer cluster in existence today.
It’s unlikely that we’re going to see quantum computers on the desktop any time soon, but it seems like Ray Kurtzweil’s theory of technological singularity, where machines are more intelligent than people, could be upon us.”
Well that sounds pretty freakin’ amazing. Just imagine what a completely different futuristic world we’ll all be living in in the near future. Just image the power of a couple of render-farms all in your budget priced desktop PC. Just image how GPU’s could benefit from this as well. Think Crysis looks amazing? In about 20 years we’ll all be laughing our asses off in disbelieve that we ever thought something as hideous as Crysis was considered “amazing”.
Comments(26)
pff I already got one at home, it does the dishes and washes my clothes!
hehe
nah, I would love to see this come to the home user and game industry, think of the things we could do!!!
Brilliant, The future’s bright…… The future’s Quantum..
Cant wait for my grey hair…lol
Interesting news, but it’s pretty much guaranteed us consumers won’t see this technology for a long time.
I would love to be proven wrong though
my brain exploded
Like Einstein predicted in the early days… Saw this (not very) portable HDD with 1 TB (1.000 GB) for about 650,- eur. Thought that was pretty cool… ow and holographic DVDs will appear being able to space up more than that HDD I just mentioned. Microprocessors getting tinier and less electronical, more chemical and scientific. Soon we will all have our Star-trek-a-like replicators in our homes. That be real cool foh sho. Can’t wait for the next thing in line… Brain chip-implants, that way you can skip school, just buy yourself knowledge, updates on the go, just connect yeself to some LRSAT-accespoints et voilà. This kind of stuff is too good to be true. Have a nice day (evening / or / sleep), Im out.
well isn’t this going back to the fifties… where they had this supercomputer and they were like wow this is soooo powerfull… well that computation power we would now not even sell to third world countries…
ok now that u gave us a reason to live.
tell us, what’s the cons/price will have to pay?
example, martin finished to learned how to build sites or to program in VB, 1 day after, the binary language is obsulete?
all the c,c++,perl,assembler etc’ are no longer useful?
or its a patch-coder-translaton-platform thingy?
. . but can it run linux? :p
Brain chip implants sure, brain chip updates…scary because Windows Update comes to mind haha after insalling brain pack 2 now YOU are crashing, rebooting and needing surgery.
I’m not letting any microsoft code get near my brain. It already gives me headaches without actually being inside.
Not only are our computers leaping ahead in the speed/amount of problems they can tackle, but we are learning better and smarter ways to implement them as well. Pretty soon we’ll assign a quantum computer to predict new problems that could be solved using computing. Talk about guaranteeing work for itself.
Cheers to the future,
Jay
As long as they don’t load the OS called “Skynet” onto it, we’ll be fine.
Has any1 seen any good torrents for windows vista yet that work and can be activated and so on and so on..
Superconducts have also been on the way for the last 10 years. They still cant operate under -130C. And that hardware started also at 0 Kelvin. So its going to take a while to tweak – but atleast its on its way!
this technology sounds absolutley incredible it just makes me think of the commodore and what not of years gone bye and just about laugh my ass off.I always knew the Canadians where good at something!
so they aren’t even sure they are using “quantum” computing or just a slow analog processor?
Lots of weird questions…
Ehm, it’s just a new way of transferring data. No more bits. And by the time we get there (10, 15 maybe 20 years) C++ will be a bad joke old programmers use to scare the young programmers. 
And yes this kind of revolutionary leap in technology happens every few decades. But it’s awesome every time.
Just like anything technology related this will get old some day and it’ll then be replaced by something even more amazing. (sub-subatomic data??)
Interesting theory, doctor.
Chance of Singularity in the next 10 years: 66.1%
Chance of a New Technology in the next 10 years: 99.3%
Chance of an event causing a shift in thinking in the next 10 years: 99.9%
See you there.
Bru
“Consider a problem that has these four properties:
1. The only way to solve it is to guess answers repeatedly and check them ”
sounds like what i do sometimes! lol
that is absolute zero, is that even possible to be that cold? I mean I think it would be news if someone was able to cool something to absolute zero.
cool stuff indeed. makes me wanna stay healthier(quit smoking, drink less) just so i can live long enough to see what’s up ahead in 30yrs.
I’m guessing the company developing this further will be named Cyberdyne Systems
Quantum technology scares me bigtime…… We are not ready for this… not by a longshot!
Quantom processing, eh? See you in hell stupid Intel! xD
that is absolute zero, is that even possible to be that cold?
no, it’s not possible but you get very near
well written article, kevin
disbelief instead of disbelieve though…
R1pper: You need to distinguish between the language and the compiler/interpreter. You sure need a new compiler/interpreter that supports the new commands that such CPUs offer.
If you want to use the power of such computers though, you’ll even need completely new algorithms. The style how you write down such an algorithm could look like todays C++ as an example. It’s up to the compiler to translate it properly. (Which you won’t see because developing a C++ compiler nowadays is already a pain in the arse which takes several years.)
There are far superior languages though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming) that allow you to express problems easier–depending on the context. I presume these will become more of a choice for such kind of computers.
R1pper: You need to distinguish between the language and the compiler/interpreter. You sure need a new compiler/interpreter that supports the new commands that such CPUs offer.
If you want to use the power of such computers though, you’ll even need completely new algorithms. The style how you write down such an algorithm could look like todays C++ as an example. It’s up to the compiler to translate it properly. (Which you won’t see because developing a C++ compiler nowadays is already a pain in the arse which takes several years.)
There are far superior languages though (functional programming languages like Haskell or LISP) that allow you to express problems easier–depending on the context. I presume these will become more of a choice for such kind of computers.