I’m not deep enough in that topic, but for mildly entertaining criticism of that whole thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NKYxdzSNqzE&t=343s

Short version, they made digital quantum qubits where the previous state of the art required a lot of analog sensors and controls. This means the equipment needed to hook up the qubits is simpler, and they’re hoping to build on this design to make scalable quantum computers that can support many more qubits than current techniques

See: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8669

Expert in the field said they are nowhere close in a YT comment on the announcement. Looks like all BS hype to me.

Chip hype is always garbage IMO. Real hardware takes 10 years from napkin idea to first delivery of a any product. There is no fast track here. The cutting edge nodes are extremely expensive to design for and you’re largely doing so based on the future node that doesn’t fully exist yet to be relevant.

So what do they have. Where was the tech 10 years ago, and why is that relevant now. The only thing I see that is relevant is that the market is all over Nvidia and there are a lot of fools playing that stock. So a hyped chip is an easy scam to bait the fools at the moment.

Nothing in quantum is relevant at all anyways. The only thing it can do with value is break encryption. It has no other real application outside of potential military communications. That is the only reason it is funded IMO. The funding for quantum compute is a tiny fraction of AI because AI solves most of the same potential problems.

I don’t know anything about quantum computing, but recently I heard a long talk by a quantum-computing expert who were trying to convince us to work on quantum error correction.

His (probably optimistic) estimate is that with a good amount if help, we might achieve 100 logical qbit in 5 to 10 years. Completely unpredicted breakthrough is rare in computer science; if Microsoft’s tech can actually solve quantum computing (as you discribed), it would have made much much bigger wave than this.

There isn’t enough information to know yet. There’s some science and a lot of self promoting hype in the press release.

part of the work in designing a chip isnt just designing and attaching wires, but designing the fundamental instruction set and system architecture that goes along with the chip.

because since you have an architecture(think like x86, arm, powerpc, risc-v), developers can start to actually formulate instructions on what to do with said hardware., be it if it was deaigned for 8 qbit, or 1million down the line, the point is that theres a baseline now in which one can start formulating and try to execute said commands.