Quantum Computing And How Far We've Come

Hello and welcome to another to another blog on Cowboy Computer Repair. At This time of year we are well in to the holiday season, though as much as I’d like to talk about that, I have made a commitment to make this blog more about tech than day to day musing. With that said, I hope you will stay a while to learn a bit about what’s so different about a Quantum Computer compared to what we have now.

With the normal method of making computers, smaller is usually better. Smaller components that can fit in a smaller sized package to make calculations at lightning fast speeds, due not only to the amount of components available to them (which is a lot thanks to machines making machines) but being smaller can allow for further efficiency due to the signals inside of them having to travel less of a distance, meaning less time between point A and B. Unfortunately this design has a limit, as all things do.

We can only make them so small. Even the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, a recent addition in high end CPUs can only fit 13.1 billions Transistors, which sort of act as the gates by which a signal of 1 or 0 is sent through. To be fair this is quite a lot, though we are approaching the upper limit of what’s possible with that method. This is the key difference between classical and quantum computing, for where one relies on sending signals of zeroes or ones, quantum computer can send a zero, a one, and everything in between. By registering states of the quantum particles as signals, such as the orientation of a photon or the spin of an electron, quantum computers are able to compute far more signals in the same space a classical computer would need to simply get a 1 or 0.

While this difference is made even more staggering with the addition of quantum entanglement, for all its advantages it has a huge drawback flaw. One that will keep in far and away from being a personal computer in someone’s home for a good 100 years. In order to do all this it needs to be kept at super cooled temperature, not because of the extreme heat this may generate, but because most of its functions can only occur at around -273.13 Celsius, which is somewhat colder than even a meat freezer is capable of but necessary due to the nature of Low Energy Physics.

So even if what we have is coming to its logical end in capability, we will just have to live with it until someone finds a whole different way to change the game (Which a lab in South Korea may have done just recently.)

Thanks for reading, and I hope this knowledge helps you through your day to day.