4 ms·
It depends on the problem. Let's take the 2048-RSA integer factorization problem. Back of the envelope calculation: The best classical algorithm takes 10^34 s
by joak 7y ago
It depends on the problem. Let's take the 2048-RSA integer factorization problem.
Back of the envelope calculation:
The best classical algorithm takes 10^34 steps. The fastest computer on earth _Summit supercomputer_ runs at 200 petaflops (2.5M cores, ~10^6x faster than your desktop computer)
Actual quantum computers perform at 1 million operations/s per qubit
for 2048-RSA, Shor's algorithm needs 4096 non-noisy qubits (we are far from that) and run in 10^7 steps
So for this particular problem:
Best classical computer (as of today): 1 billion years
An (hypothetical) quantum computer: ~10 seconds
Yeah, a trillion times faster...
- Causality1 7y agoInteresting, thank you. It makes me wonder if we'll ever find a way to make quantum computers do "easy" math as well as they do difficult math, if we'll ever have general-purpose computers that do their arithmetic and rendering on a quantum processor instead of a transistorized one. Is it even hypothetically possible for a quantum computer to do something like render a web page using less electricity than a conventional cpu?