Question: How will quantum computing affect Moore's law?

Gopal Ramchurn answered on 19 Jun 2013:

Moore’s law talks about computing power – in terms of the number of transistors on a chip. Moore’s law is likely to be obsolete when we won’t be able to make smaller transistors. Instead, quantum computing takes a different approach to computing – it is much more complex than using transistors – it looks at states of atomic level particles (particularly how they spin). In fact, it’s so complex that right now, special machines need to be built to solve very specific computation problems using quantum computing. So, if we take Moore’s law as a projection of how computing power (rather than transistors on a chip) will grow in the future, quantum computing machines are likely to make the law obsolete as they will enable computations that are tens or hundreds of times much faster than just twice the speed of what it was in the previous year.