Here's a short recap of the quantum computing breakthroughs announced to much fanfare in November.
A Chinese team said it had solved industrial-grade production of integrated quantum computers.
An American team at Princeton said it had kept qubits stable for over a millisecond, 15x typical performance.
IBM announced new QPUs it says will give it a fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029.
IQM said it would ship a 150-qubit system in 2026.
NVIDIA said its quantum-GPU link was now in use in at least 15 countries.
Quantinuum said its new Helios (the world’s most accurate general-purpose commercial quantum computer”) breached quantum advantage again, harder this time.
And that is not counting new alliances, new research collaborations, new startups, and other steps towards having an effective quantum computer, with all the wonderful advancements in many fields that may bring.
All of which suggests that Q-Day, the day when public key infrastructure (PKI) is broken by quantum math monsters – and which has CISOs scrambling to overhaul their cryptographic estates – is nigh. Ditto the game-changing innovations that quantum computers could offer.
Except, maybe not. Also in November, an alliance involving IBM launched the Quantum Advantage Tracker to benchmark genuine performance.
Because – even at this seemingly late stage in development – there is disagreement on what would constitute quantum advantage and when real-world impact of this much-promised set of technologies will occur.
