CHIPX Quantum Photonics

Another massive compute advance.

CHIPX, the Chip Hub for Integrated Photonics Xplore, assisted Turing Quantum in building a quantum photonic processor.

They’ve got the ability to build a thousand thin film lithium niobate processor wafers a month and claim they are already in data centers. This is a (start groaning now) quantum leap over European and U.S. efforts in this area.

Like yesterday’s Extropic thermodynamic computing piece, this is a sea change. The rush for AI has ended the incremental improvement in Von Neuman machines and the mad rush to build the broader, specialized versions of VN machines we call GPUs.

Moore’s Law is the observation that computing power doubles about every two years, and this has held since I first sat down in front of an 8μ (micrometer) Motorola 6502 based computer in the late 1970s until right now with the 5 nanometer chip in the RTX 5060Ti idling behind me.

There have been twenty four cycles of doubling since that little Apple ][, a sixteen million fold increase. A thousandfold improvement in one shot is twenty years of advancement all at once. Although what the processors do are radically different, the scale of change is similar to Extropic’s ten thousandfold improvement in power usage.

And these are NOT NOT NOT Von Neuman machines, they are quantum. Thirteen months ago I quietly made Post Quantum Cryptography Reading available. I have the skills needed to build a post quantum cryptography setup for my systems, but I am not that compulsive about it, I just want the OpenSSL fork that has it to become the new norm.

And now I suspect that meandering path of acceptance of these new methods is going to become … urgent.