With AI and the bull run of crypto being all the rage I wanted to circle back to quantum computers again. This one is mostly flying under the radar and people are not really talking about it. But it actully is a step forward towards massive scaling of everything.
To put this into perspective I was going to buy a new CPU when Intel released their latest chip to upgrade my old 7 year chip. However after further review it was honestly underwhelming and the amount of extra usage that I would have gotten out of it was rather small in that 7 year time frame. In fact in most cases as long as you didn't care much about power usage then a chip that's 3-4 years old would actully be the better bet!
This shows us that CPU manufactures are pretty much peaking out and the only way they are growing really is to throw more chips and threads on to a board and either a) making the board larger so more can fit or b) being able to stuff more chips on to the board in the same amount of space known as the mm chip sets. Or of course c do both which is also what is happening.
However there's no real faster. You can of course over clock the thing but you're pretty much peaking out at around 5GHz-6GHz and often for short bursts and only on a few dedicated chips. This is mainly because it's near impossible to cool these things off which is another issue which we might see CPU coolers start to really take on.
What is a quantum CPU
I think the best and fastest way to explain this would be the following. Currently computers work with binary code which just means a 1 or a 0 or on or off and this pattern tells the software etc to do random things. However there's a limit to this in which it needs to reset in order to process the next bit and so forth. With a quantum chip it can be in any state any any time a 1 or a 0.
To further explain that lets say you have a maze or a problem you want to solve. A normal CPU would run each maze pattern one at a time as fast as it could until it found the solution pretty much brute force. Now a quantum CPU would take all possible options and run it though in a stream finding the solution in a fraction of the time of a normal CPU.
Willow
Willow is the next evolution in the quantum chip set. It is also not the first. In 2017 they released foxtail, 2018 bristlecone and in 2019 sycamore. So it's been a good 5 years since a chip has come up that's actully a large amount of time.
When google released willow they release it with a sample showing that willow was able to solve the problem in 5 minutes when a comparable CPU super computer would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to solve. Yep you read that right.
Why It Took So Long
A big issue of why quantum computers took so long is what is known as quantum coherence. Its the amount of time a a qubit can hold it's quantum state before it collapses. The other issue is what is know as the critical error threshold. In simple form it means how often it can be wrong or error out that we as humans are ok with. So yeah even computers get it wrong at times.
How this is currently handled in quantum computing is that there are three version in this case. It does this by doing the same thing at the same time to get the answer. If one of those three gets a wrong message it will simply copy over what the other two got right which is like a self check.
With willow it's been projected in tests that the quibits are able to last about 5x longer then the last chip set. And well to be honest with you that's not a huge leap. There was a 5 year gap which means every year the advancement has been the same each year with no real rapid progression other then more time passed between the chips. What will be interesting to see is the growth between this chip and then the next for measurements and the time frame. This will give us an idea of pace speed and if there's really been a major breakthrough or not.
We are also seeing integrations of AI and machine learning into these systems which is allowing them to get better and more rapidly figure things out. This is a perfect blend and one that might be taking these computers to the next level rather quickly.
What Can Willow Do?
I think the next important question to ask is what can willow actully do as a quantum chip? Does it work in a way where it can run my windows machine at break neck speed?
Willow has 105 total qbits in it which is actully a rather low number when it comes to cracking wallet codes etc. It could maybe do it but it's most likely not going to do it very well. Now that's to say that in todays age that's the results but with tech things always seem to rapidly change and that 105 qbits today could be 500, 1,000 or 1 million tomorrow.
Currently the prediction of evolution of these chips would put them very well capable of cracking bitcoin wallets in about 5-10 years. Yep, we might have quantum blockchains or quantum resistant blockchains(which we currently have but who knows how good they are) here rather soon.
But would we get to that point ever?
It seems unlikely or if it did the other side of it would have to be WELL ahead. That's because if it could even get close to cracking bitcoin then it for sure would be able to crack into banks or nuclear launch codes!
Now the thing with bitcoin though or really any blockchain is it can always hard fork into a new blockchain and that blockchain would be anti quantum computer for example. I can't really predict what that would look like as we are still years out but as tech moves bitcoin would move as well.