Skip to content

Appendix B - Breakthroughs Required

Appendix B: The Physics Breakthroughs Required

For quantum computing to become economically viable, all of the following breakthroughs must occur — not just some:

  1. Error rates must decrease by 10-100x across all gate types, simultaneously, on a single platform
  2. Qubit counts must increase by 1,000-10,000x while maintaining or improving per-qubit quality
  3. Coherence times must increase by 10-100x to allow complex algorithms to complete before quantum information is lost
  4. Qubit connectivity must dramatically improve or compilation overhead must be radically reduced
  5. Cryogenic systems must scale to support millions of qubits with millions of control lines (for superconducting platforms)
  6. Classical control electronics must be co-located at cryogenic temperatures or new interconnect technologies must be invented
  7. Quantum error correction overhead must decrease dramatically through new codes or new physics
  8. Practical algorithms must be discovered that provide substantial advantage over the best classical algorithms on commercially important problems
  9. The cost per useful quantum operation must decrease to be competitive with classical cloud computing for at least some workloads
  10. All of the above must happen on the same platform, at the same time

The probability of any one of these breakthroughs occurring within 10 years is debatable. The probability of all ten occurring simultaneously is the product of their individual probabilities — which, even under optimistic assumptions, is very small.