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Is it vulnerable to meltdown?
maybe if you run out of liquid helium ;)
Maybe if it was running real world applications with system and user space. Right now these all run prototype code
What makes one quantum computer superior to another? Not number of qubits, I guess? IBM has a 50-qubit machine.
Same as classical computers, what makes Intel i7 superior to AMD Ryzen 7?

One that can perform a computation task fastest with least energy would clearly be superior to another.

Did they give any numbers on the quality of the qubits? For example, IBM's 20 qubit chip has 2-qubit operations with error rates on the order of 5% [1] (some pairs of qubits are better, some are worse). Quantum supremacy experiments require thousands of operations (tens of layers of parallel operations). Qubits with even a 1% error rate per operation just won't cut it.

1: https://youtu.be/T-8uuq7Izl8?t=26m58s "Experimental quantum computing at IBM" [26:58]

(Disclosure: I work on Google's quantum team.)

> Did they give any numbers on the quality of the qubits?

No they didn't. I've also had problems finding the benchmarks for their 17 qubit processor. I would appreciate if someone could link them to me.

What is it means for humanity?
Better drugs/more complex medicines should be possible. Chemical interactions are hard to do on classical computers (operating on 5D+ arrays), true quantum computers should be able to help with those computations.
Do you have easy material for me to understand how quantum computing enables that kind of things? And does it use clasic numerical method computing or using different kind of mathematical approach? Actually I'm not sure whether my question makes sense or not
I guess taking every branch by default avoids the specter of branch prediction vulnerabilities?

(This is me failing my saving throw vs urge to make terrible nerd jokes.)