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Quantum Processor

Big.Wayne said:
Can anyone help me understand the defination of Quantum? :confused: the definition from Wiki in the opening
Click to expand...

The following also from the wiki page gives an example:

'A photon, for example, is a single quantum of light, and may thus be referred to as a "light quantum". The energy of an electron bound to an atom (at rest) is said to be quantized, which results in the stability of atoms, and of matter in general.'

I found that slightly more straightforward, it seems like looking into it a bit further it is saying a quantum is a single quantifiable unit of something at the subatomic level. I think it is saying that an elementary particle is a quantum but i'm not sure if im just jumping to that conclusion.

The wiki article on elementary particles states:

"A central feature in elementary particle theory is the early 20th century idea of 'quanta', which revolutionised the understanding of electromagnetic radiation and brought about quantum mechanics."


When I was at uni I missed out on a chance to go to a lecture with a guy from CERN talking about quantum computing otherwise I might be able to say something more about it.
 
Processcomp-open.jpg


It's here ! Quantum (2) CPU LOL


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And a bit more futuristic one
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I wonder why the russian name on it tho...
 
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Hard drives have lasers? :D

This is a very interesting discussion. You are correct that we are going have to change the way our microprocessors are built if we are to continue to push the power up. These are interesting times.
 
Ok I will try my best to explain my limited understanding..

In a 'normal' computer each operation has a state of 1 or 0, multiple states of 1 or 0 are used to store information / perform calculations.

In a quantum computer you can have a state of 1 or 0 or both (and technically all points between 1 and 0 as well) at the same time this is known as a superposition. So a quantum computer isn't limited to two states, they encode information in superposition's which are of infinite state. Each of these recording states is known as a Qubit.

So when people talk about a 4 or 8 qubit quantum computer each of those qubit's is storing information as a 0-3 or 0-7 depending on the number of qubit's and all possible numbers between 0-3 and 0-7.

The superposition of the qubits is what gives the quantum computer it's power because effectively they can be in any state. So last I read it was theorised that a 30 Qubit quantum computer will have around 10 teraflops of processing power
 
I definetly can see us using carbon nanotubes before we take the step to quantum computing. But another problem I see with this is our current software. We are making full use of bits with our software, be it 32 bit, 64 bit, etc. Even though qubits can still be 0 and 1, would it still run bits effectively? Would the cpus be backwards compatible?
Oh and now it makes me think of the new OS's, imagine something like Windows 10(?) 8 qubit version.
 
Thanks Pneumonic for that great explanation! :)

superposition . . . check . . . . Qubit . . . . check! :cool:

Now I am wondering what "10 teraflops of processing power" means! :D
 
A little bit off-topic but may be of interest to people following this thread, looking into some articles on wikipedia I came across this about chemical computing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_computer

Using chemical reactions to run computations, they have produced working logic gates and are looking at designing a form of chemical calculator using these theories.
 
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