Reality check: hardware is still far from breaking RSA

What happened

The gap is still wide: the largest gate-model processors demonstrated hold on the order of a thousand physical qubits (IBM's Condor at 1,121; Atom Computing's 1,180-qubit neutral-atom array), logical-qubit counts reach 96 (QuEra and Harvard, December 2025), and the highest-fidelity trapped-ion machines hold around 100 physical qubits, whereas even the most optimistic recent estimates require hundreds of thousands to a million physical qubits to factor RSA-2048.