Hacker News: qubob

New comment by qubob in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

qubob — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:26:52 +0000

Tim's departure announcement is timed between product announcements. Although, not a surprise to anyone

As for Ternus' timing:

A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)

B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)

C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider

D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.

New comment by qubob in "Nvidia should be 'shaking in their boots' as quantum computing battles AI GPUs"

qubob — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:32:13 +0000

Intel used to say, "For every GPU sold there's an Intel CPU sold." At least in the PC gaming days, when that was Nvidia's core biz and Intel had no real response (frankly, that apathetic retort could explain a lot about Intel's struggles). Now, Nvidia is taking a similar approach -- for every QPU sold there are n GPUs sold. And, they will be right for the next 5 years or so because hybrid workflows, where classical are integral to the workload and quantum is specialized, are the common case. But, if QPU roadmaps are true, GPU/CPU supercomputers will be losing ground to QPU supercomputers. At which point, Nvidia probably acquires a QPU company. And QPU companies merge with other GPU/CPU companies. Disruption will force a change in the supercomputing business. Nvidia may or may not be a winner. We shall see.

New comment by qubob in "Caltech quantum startup Oratomic launches with achieving scaling breakthrough"

qubob — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:42:19 +0000

This is a pretty impressive development in quantum. Neutral Atoms will likely be a cornerstone modality in qc for the foreseeable future. The error correction regime is driving so much advancement. Prof. Preskill's role should also be taken seriously, as he has historically leaned very heavy into academia and not into commercialization. Even JP has gotta get his bag

New comment by qubob in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

qubob — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:44:53 +0000

Also, there's a CalTech affiliated startup called Oratomic Inc that is building a Rydberg system. I think it's the same team that demonstrated 6100 qubits. And, I hear Preskill is an advisor.

New comment by qubob in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

qubob — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:11:20 +0000

Exciting times indeed! Will be fun to see how this all plays out.

Thanks for taking a look at Quop. If you explore it more, I'd be curious what you think as someone who follows the hardware side closely. I'll post something soon.

New comment by qubob in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

qubob — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:22:05 +0000

Thank you :). I'm not affiliated with Qubob project, it's just a name I picked.

QC has had its share of hype cycles. Businesses need to have a vision (which is where hype seeps in), and must be honest about what's possible today.

I am building quop.ai, a service which makes quantum computing accessible to technical and non-technical folks who don't have degrees in quantum physics.

I am not super familiar with the silicon spin, but Qutech is making progress: https://qutech.nl/2026/02/12/rolling-out-the-carpet-for-spin....

Oxford Ionics (acquired by IonQ) has a CMOS trapped ion approach: https://www.oxionics.com/blogs/unveiling-oxford-ionics-devel...

Intel is also involved in silicon spin / quantum dots with their Tunnel Falls milestone: https://quantumcomputingreport.com/argonne-national-laborato...

CalTech work is super interesting! Neutral Atoms look to be a compelling modality. QuEra and Pasqal are commercial players worth looking into.

New comment by qubob in "2025 Turing award given for quantum information science"

qubob — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:08:37 +0000

Commercialization can bring in speculators and hype. And, I'd argue that speculation is a necessary for accelerating market development. Commercialization brings with it unique forcing functions that don't exist in academic settings, and this historically leads to acceleration of functional products. The first step is building a quantum computer to learn how to build a quantum computer. That step is done, while research continues in many areas, the commercialization challenges are largely engineering in nature.

I've only seen 34 qubit simulators (eg AWS SV1). My understanding is that 34 qubit uses 512GB of RAM, and each additional qubit doubles the RAM requirement. So, 50 qubit simulated would require 16.8M GB of RAM.

100 logical qubits seems to be the minimal threshold for interesting/useful quantum computing, albeit with very limited use cases. Classical still beats most. Quantinuum will hit that number in 2027. And, IonQ (often cited as being a hype-machine) expected to have 800 logical qubits in 2027.

The industry is moving out of the NISQ Era (noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum) and into the Fault-Tolerant QC (FTQC) era. NISQ is experimental. FTQC is commercial (ie reliable, repeatable).