Silicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years. Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late:
The engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it! Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want them.
I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they build to get one working.
Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.
Can they do that here, they've got quite a few sets of 4/5 atoms which they've interconnected, so that's a lot to get by shotgunning it. I'd assumed they were using something like a STM to nudge the atoms around.
This is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work shown in the actual source / link. I don’t mean to be argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent reading it after reading the Nature version. It’s just “go read Nature” + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.
"early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days" relatively.
What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.
Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?
That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
I think the point being made is that the graphs don't show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999% or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?
Silicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years. Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late:
- Intel can now do 2D which means a Surface code can be run on these devices: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918
- HRL can now do 2D as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861
- They are solving the wiring problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3
- Their interconnects are high fidelity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w
The engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it! Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want them. I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they build to get one working.
Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.
Can they do that here, they've got quite a few sets of 4/5 atoms which they've interconnected, so that's a lot to get by shotgunning it. I'd assumed they were using something like a STM to nudge the atoms around.
Source and “readable” article: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/12/17/sqc-study-shows-sil...
This is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work shown in the actual source / link. I don’t mean to be argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent reading it after reading the Nature version. It’s just “go read Nature” + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.
Can it run Shor's?
No, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500
That's a 404; here's a working link: https://algassert.com/post/2500
Oops, updated. Thanks!
I'm not sure you can really call it "early days" anymore. The first quantum computer was in 1998. That's 27 years ago.
"early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days" relatively.
It's not only early days in hardware, it's early days in practical applications as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124
It should be able to factor 15.
So can a 10 year old. The breakthrough I’m waiting for is factoring something I cant do in my head.
And so can a dog: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
But it can’t because the error rate is still too high even for the most trivial examples
Ahh yes another quantum processor that creates noise.
Quantum Computing is a scam.
I have not seen any progress or breakthroughs in the QC field at all that are significant.
If the only goal for QC is to try to run Shor's algorithm or to "try to break the bitcoin blockchain" then it is worse than useless.
QC progress happens super-exponentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233
Graphs aren't telling me anything.
What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.
Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?
That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
> The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation
Then invest accordingly, and later reinvest your winnings in a different direction.
The graphs aren't telling you that QC hardware is not improving at a super-exponential pace?
There are no real world use cases today. The hardware is not advanced enough yet, but it's improving exponentially.
I think the point being made is that the graphs don't show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999% or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?
> Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?
Quantum theory predicts that they will work given enough time. If they don't work, there is something about physics that we are missing.