A couple of things tiger. That article is out of date, it sates that semiconductors will only reach 1GHz in 2 years. That article was from the Petaflops Architecture WorkShop, 1996. If they stated quantum (I'll get to that later) computing will be available in 2 years they were off a bit.
What they stated in the article was the arcitecture would be feasable for 10 years (I can quote if needs be)so that would be '06. And that the performance they would talk about would be a 5 year in the future equivalent (last year so also a bit off).
The quantum computing they talked about the is not the QUANTUM computing that gets the headlines,this is quantum tunneling, a way off moving things (usually electrons into and out of atoms) with low energy requirements, this has the side effect of increased speed. This is still a purely serial application.
Lastly this article is superconductors, and not even high temp superconductors at that, they talk about cooling with liquid nitrogen (BP of77.35 °K) , and even worce helium (BP of 4.549994 °K). The 5GHz proc at least has some apllication for high end computing (servers down) while this could only be used in super-super-computers.
Edward
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