{"id":1120,"date":"2005-11-07T14:33:21","date_gmt":"2005-11-07T21:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2005-11-07T14:33:21","modified_gmt":"2005-11-07T21:33:21","slug":"qubiting-for-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/11\/07\/qubiting-for-dollars\/","title":{"rendered":"Qubiting for Dollars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rod Van Meter makes the prediction that the first production quantum computer will cost <a href=\"http:\/\/rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com\/2005\/11\/forty-bucks-qubit.html#comments\">forty bucks a qubit<\/a>.  He arrives at this number by assuming the first application will be factoring a 1,024 bit number which requires about five kilobits (kiloqubits?) and adds in a factor of fifty for quantum error correction.  Thus there is a total of one quarter of a million qubits and figures such a machine could cost around ten million for the figure of forty bucks a qubit.  It&#8217;s interesting to reason about this by first setting the cost instead of by estimating the actual costs.  Why I like this approach is that if we suppose that a similar quantum computer costs ten times as much, then we simply won&#8217;t be building such a computer.  Of course, I&#8217;m not sure how much the NSA would pay for a quantum computer: it may indeed be in the hundred million dollar range if factors 1,024 bit numbers.<br \/>\nOf course, I don&#8217;t believe in quantum error correction&#8230;or rather I don&#8217;t <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/quant-ph\/0506023\">believe<\/a> we will use the standard approach to quantum error correcting to obtain a fault-tolerant quantum computer \ud83d\ude09 .  Thus I&#8217;m betting the first quantum computer will cost around a dollar a qubit (although I certainly think some of these &#8220;qubits&#8221; may in fact be made up of hundreds to thousands to millions to 10^19 number of single quantum systems.)<br \/>\nIt will be interesting to see how far off Rod and I are at date Q.  I suspect Rod will be closer mostly because he&#8217;s actually worked in the real world.<br \/>\n<b>Update<\/b>: For comparison the ENIAC cost about half a million dollars in 1945 which is about five million dollars in today&#8217;s money.  The total number of vacuum tubes in that monster was around 20,000.   Thats 500 of today&#8217;s dolars per vacuum tube.  And, of course, today, I can buy a computer with <del datetime=\"2005-11-08T12:30:1108:00\">50 million<\/del> more than a billion transistors for under five hundred bucks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rod Van Meter makes the prediction that the first production quantum computer will cost forty bucks a qubit. He arrives at this number by assuming the first application will be factoring a 1,024 bit number which requires about five kilobits (kiloqubits?) and adds in a factor of fifty for quantum error correction. Thus there is &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/11\/07\/qubiting-for-dollars\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Qubiting for Dollars&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}