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by qubob 86 days ago
Commercialization can bring in speculators and hype. And, I'd argue that speculation is a necessary for accelerating market development. Commercialization brings with it unique forcing functions that don't exist in academic settings, and this historically leads to acceleration of functional products. The first step is building a quantum computer to learn how to build a quantum computer. That step is done, while research continues in many areas, the commercialization challenges are largely engineering in nature.

I've only seen 34 qubit simulators (eg AWS SV1). My understanding is that 34 qubit uses 512GB of RAM, and each additional qubit doubles the RAM requirement. So, 50 qubit simulated would require 16.8M GB of RAM.

100 logical qubits seems to be the minimal threshold for interesting/useful quantum computing, albeit with very limited use cases. Classical still beats most. Quantinuum will hit that number in 2027. And, IonQ (often cited as being a hype-machine) expected to have 800 logical qubits in 2027.

The industry is moving out of the NISQ Era (noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum) and into the Fault-Tolerant QC (FTQC) era. NISQ is experimental. FTQC is commercial (ie reliable, repeatable).

1 comments

Nice, an informative meaningful comment. From your userid; would i be correct in deducing that you are affiliated with QuBOBS Project? - https://qubobs.irif.fr/portfolio/

You are certainly right that commercialization (and speculation does play an important role here) serves as a forcing function to accelerate development of products. But this needs to be done somewhat in-sync-with/a-little-ahead-of the actual science and engineering. When the subject is inherently difficult to understand (as is the case with QC) it can very easily get out of hand and become just snake-oil/bullshit and exploited by hustlers/grifters/charlatans.

Do you have any links to more information on the points that you make above that you can share? Specifically on hybrid quantum-classical systems and silicon-based shuttling-qubits which can use current foundry technology? To me, this seems to be the future since both the scaling and availability are taken care of.

As regards scaling of qubits, Caltech recently achieved 6100(!) qubit-array - https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-team-sets-record-...

Wikipedia also has a list of quantum processors and their specs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_quantum_processors

Thank you :). I'm not affiliated with Qubob project, it's just a name I picked.

QC has had its share of hype cycles. Businesses need to have a vision (which is where hype seeps in), and must be honest about what's possible today.

I am building quop.ai, a service which makes quantum computing accessible to technical and non-technical folks who don't have degrees in quantum physics.

I am not super familiar with the silicon spin, but Qutech is making progress: https://qutech.nl/2026/02/12/rolling-out-the-carpet-for-spin....

Oxford Ionics (acquired by IonQ) has a CMOS trapped ion approach: https://www.oxionics.com/blogs/unveiling-oxford-ionics-devel...

Intel is also involved in silicon spin / quantum dots with their Tunnel Falls milestone: https://quantumcomputingreport.com/argonne-national-laborato...

CalTech work is super interesting! Neutral Atoms look to be a compelling modality. QuEra and Pasqal are commercial players worth looking into.

Thanks for the pointers. I had seen them before except for the qutech one. I firmly believe the silicon approach to qubits is the way to go; but we will see how the market (and technology viability) settles everything. These are exciting times for hard Physics.

Also had a look at your quop.ai; seems pretty interesting though i need to explore it a bit more.

You might want to think about posting quop.ai to HN and get some feedback ;-)

Exciting times indeed! Will be fun to see how this all plays out.

Thanks for taking a look at Quop. If you explore it more, I'd be curious what you think as someone who follows the hardware side closely. I'll post something soon.

Also, there's a CalTech affiliated startup called Oratomic Inc that is building a Rydberg system. I think it's the same team that demonstrated 6100 qubits. And, I hear Preskill is an advisor.