If a QC could be made to run for 2^20 (ish) longer and to have 2^3 better quality than SOTA then they could do this on it. That would be great because it would run in about 10 seconds, which I assume is much quicker than the run time on GPU's (although the article doesn't make that clear).
Also we have to solve the (not so famous) it-takes-2-days-to-turn-the-f-thing-on problem of QC, and also the the-f-thing-costs-a-fortune issue also.
But apart from this being technologically out of reach for 70 years it's absolutely a great and important result.
I don't think NV sales sagging will happen any time soon. It's more of a case of moving a small amount of product at once and getting their name in the press than that it is a side bet.
Note that if QC does take off NVidia won't be taking any of that cake because they are simulating what it would be like to have such a computer and if they would have one they wouldn't need GPUs to pretend they do. From a technical perspective this if for NVidia not much different from any other HPC sale.
It's weird that people are coming to my company and saying "we want to do a project on QC to do this interesting thing" and then when we say "sorry that's imaginary for 70 years" they go off and do it with someone else anyway. Literally they make a demo that they know won't work for 70 years.
Ok, Ok I could be wrong... it could just be 30 years. But even if it's 5 this is way way way out of the lightcone for these businesses.
This has been happening for three years at least. I feel like I did when people were asking about blockchain.
I look at it from another perspective. Nvidia well have experience with QC programming techniques when the QC hardware actually becomes available. Just as Ada Lovelace is recognized as being the first computer programmer, before the actual computer machines were available.
