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| IBM has a quantum chip that outperforms today's chips |
IBM announced Monday that it has taken a giant step toward practical quantum computing, announcing that it has developed a new quantum computing chip that will allow quantum systems to outperform conventional supercomputers on certain tasks over the course of two years.
IBM states that an Eagle computer chip has 127 qubits that can represent information in quantum form.
Classical supercomputers operate on a single bit, and the bit must be 1 or 0. But quantum bits can be 1 and 0 at the same time.
The company says that every person on Earth needs more regular parts than those in atoms to simulate an eagle.
IBM owes this breakthrough to a new design that places processor control components in multiple physical layers. Qubits are in a single layer. The company said that this design can significantly improve computing power.
This fact could one day make quantum computers much faster than classical computers. But qubits are very difficult to create and require huge cooling space to function properly.
Although Apple's latest M1 Max chip contains 57 billion transistors, which is a rough representation of bits, IBM said the new Eagle chip is the first with more than 100 qubits.
But IBM says the new technology it learned in making chips is made at its facility in New York State, and when combined with other advances in cooling and control systems, quantum computers are producing more qubits.
IBM announces a promising new quantum chip
The company announced Monday that it plans to launch an Osprey chip with 433 qubits and a Condor chip with 1121 qubits in 2022.
The company said it was close to what is known as the quantum advantage at this point, whereby quantum computers can outperform conventional supercomputers.
This does not mean that quantum computers are immediately superior to classical supercomputers. Instead, the company envisions a world in which parts of computer applications run on traditional chips while others run on quantum chips, depending on what works best for the task at hand.
"Our goal is to be able to demonstrate quantitative superiority in the next two years," the company said.
The company stated that the Eagle processor can be delivered to select members of the IBM Quantum network via IBM Cloud as an exploration system. The discovery system provides quick access to the company's latest technology. Therefore, the company does not guarantee uptime or any specific level of repeatable performance based on quantitative volume.