There’s no stopping them now, and I don’t just mean IBM. Many a company are involved in the race to be the first to achieve quantum supremacy, but this week IBM have sneaked that little bit further forward. The company’s secret weapon in the race is its most powerful quantum chip to date that uses 17 qubits.
Previously it proved to be quite difficult to lay out chips side by side, but researchers have not got around that issue and it’s proved very useful indeed. It also suggests that scaling up the devices in the future is quite plausible too. Another of IBM’s new chips features 16 qubits, which makes it slightly less powerful than the first, larger one. But this one is much more robust and the company is even using it to upgrade its own online service that allows algorithms to be tested on quantum chips by any researcher wanting to have a go.
IBM is still staying relatively quiet when it comes to revealing what leaps it had made in regards to making these new chips, but one thing it did say was that the advances in the materials it used and the architecture of the 17 qubit device made it “at least twice as powerful” as its predecessor. As the race continues to produce the first useful quantum device, this jump in processing power has certainly given IBM a big boost forward.
While Goggle has announced that it will produce a 49 qubit device by the end of 2017, only time will tell if the company can achieve it. IBM’s future plans include creating a 50 qubit device, but that will be over the next few years. So, it looks like IBM and Google are fighting for the number one position in the quantum race but so far IBM is inching ahead. Quite how long they can hold that position for with Google’s future plans in the air, who knows.
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