IBM makes huge stride toward developing scalable quantum computer

There was a BOINC project called AQUA@home which strove to emulate a quantum computer made by a firm called D-Wave. This firm sold its first computer,D-Wave 1, to a military aircraft and missile manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin. Then AQUA@home disappeared. I was the coauthor of an article on quantum computing in the Italian edition of Technology Review magazine edited by MIT in 1996.Since then nothing has changed, notwithstanding many articles in scientific and technical journals. Bubble technology for memories was a dead end street, it just disappeared.
Tullio
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I presume the claimed teraflop processing power comes from the fact that light has a very high frequency. I would like to see how a quantum computer is able to compute however?

I worked on microwave computer processing about 45 years ago. So far as I know nothing came from these primitive development even though a passive structure could perform logical operations.

No, the basic idea is that a bit can be zero or one simultaneously. It is called a qubit. So a byte can contain 2 exp 8 different values. But you won't know which value it has until you make a measurement.
Tullio
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Each 8 bit byte can have 256 patterns or states. If each qubit had 3 states then there would be only 6561 possible states in an 8-bit byte. I am not sure how this relates to the speed quoted since I could make a computer with any word length that I want. Speed is only limited by the clock which assumes that I have enough power to switch the device to it's full capability.