IBM surpasses Google again: develops 50-qubit computer prototype

Source: Content from The Paper, thank you.

In the field of quantum computers, Google has always been regarded as the "leader". Previously, Google has built a 9-qubit machine and plans to increase it to 49 qubits this year to achieve "quantum supremacy". But now, IBM has taken the lead in achieving this achievement.

On November 10, local time, at the Industrial Summit of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), IBM announced that it has successfully developed a 20-qubit quantum computer, which will be available to paying customers at the end of the year. More importantly, IBM has also successfully developed a 50-qubit prototype, which can lay the foundation for the future IBM Q system.

IBM wrote in its official blog that the coherence time (coherence time, which is the maximum time difference range in which the channel remains constant) of a 20-qubit quantum computer has doubled from 50 microseconds to an average of 90 microseconds. And the design of this quantum computer is scalable: a quantum computer based on 50 qubits also has similar performance.

A computer with 50 qubits would be a significant milestone in computer science, a milestone researchers in the field call "quantum supremacy," which means it can perform tasks that are impossible for conventional supercomputers.

Dario Gil, vice president of IBM AI and IBM Q research, said that increasing the number of qubits is only one aspect. The more qubits you deal with, the more complex the interactions between the qubits become because of the entanglement properties of quantum. If you have more qubits, but they have a high error rate when they communicate with each other, then they are not necessarily more powerful than a 5-qubit machine with a lower error rate.

Another concern is that when dealing with quantum states, they tend to exist for a short period of time in a process called coherence. This means that researchers only have a short window of time before the qubits return to the classical computing states of 0 and 1. In the late 1990s, researchers only had a few nanoseconds to focus on coherence. Even last year, IBM could only get coherence times of 47 microseconds and 50 microseconds for a 5-qubit machine. This time, IBM announced a coherence time of around 90 microseconds, which is a huge leap.

In addition to quantum computers, IBM has also made achievements in software. The QISKit it developed is a quantum information software processing toolkit that can be used to help the research community maximize the core of quantum computing systems. IBM said that this includes tools for building, manipulating, displaying and studying quantum bits based on the Python language, tools for characterizing quantum bits, batch processing task tools, and a compilation tool that can compile the required experiments to real hardware.

Since IBM launched its 5-qubit advanced computer last year, it has been making great strides in the field of quantum computers. In March this year, IBM announced that it would launch the world's first commercial quantum computing cloud service: IBM Q. This is also the world's first paid quantum computing cloud service system.

The biggest difference between quantum computers and traditional computers is that traditional computers can only solve problems one by one in chronological order, while quantum computers can solve multiple problems at the same time. The operation rules used by traditional computers are binary, and information states are recorded as 0 and 1. However, quantum computers describe information by quantum states. According to the characteristics of quantum, it can represent multiple states at the same time and perform superposition operations at the same time, thus having a faster operation method.

Since quantum computers have processing power several orders of magnitude higher than current traditional supercomputers, many people believe that quantum computers will accomplish tasks that were previously considered impossible, such as simulating chemical catalysts, building models of super-complex systems, and cracking encryption codes. However, the processing power of quantum computers developed by these companies so far is not powerful or precise enough to outperform traditional computers when running most tasks.

Today is the 1456th issue of content shared by "Semiconductor Industry Observer" for you, welcome to follow.

Follow the WeChat public account Semiconductor Industry Observation , reply to the keyword in the background to get more content

Reply Popular Science , read more popular science articles about the semiconductor industry

Reply to DRAM , read more DRAM articles

Reply Lithography , read more articles related to lithography technology

Reply Samsung , read more articles related to Samsung

Reply Full screen , read more articles related to full screen

Reply Dual camera , read more articles about dual cameras on mobile phones

Reply Millimeter wave , see more articles related to millimeter wave

Reply to IPO to see more articles related to semiconductor company IPOs

Reply Exhibition , see "2017 Latest Semiconductor Exhibition and Conference Calendar"

Reply Submit your article and read "How to become a member of "Semiconductor Industry Observer""

Reply Search and you can easily find other articles that interest you!

Click to read the original text and join the Moore Elite