“But to do really paradigm-shifting stuff, you are going to need millions of physical qubits.” Chip challenges

“It’s hoped that some useful and even commercially valuable problems can be solved using quantum computers in this thousand-to-million-qubit range,” he says. Quantum engineer Andrew Dzurak at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, thinks that with 1,000-qubit chips such as IBM’s planned Condor, the technology might start to prove its worth. Solving real-world problems such as simulating drug molecules or materials using quantum chemistry will require quantum computers to get drastically bigger and more powerful. “The current state of the art is that no experiment has demonstrated quantum advantage for practical tasks yet,” says physicist Chao-Yang Lu, who co-led the USTC effort. A team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei last year reported achieving quantum advantage using optical qubits 2 this year, it did the same with superconducting qubits 3.īut the tasks these machines were given were artificial, researchers warn. Google famously reported achieving such a ‘quantum advantage’ in 2019 1, using qubits made, like IBM’s, with superconducting loops.

Quantum advantageīy exploiting the laws of quantum physics to process binary information, quantum-computing circuits such as the Eagle chip can already do calculations that can’t easily be simulated on classical supercomputers. “It’s good to have ambitious goals, but what matters is whether they can execute their plans,” says quantum information theorist John Preskill at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Ultimately, they aim to make quantum computers capable of performing certain tasks that are out of reach of even the largest supercomputers that use classical technology. Other companies - including technology behemoths Google and Honeywell, and a slew of well-funded start-up companies - have similarly ambitious plans. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Such targets echo those that for decades the electronics industry has set itself for miniaturizing silicon chips, says Jerry Chow, head of IBM’s experimental quantum-computing group at the Thomas J. The ‘Eagle’ chip is a step towards IBM’s goal of creating a 433-qubit quantum processor next year, followed by one with 1,121 qubits, named Condor, by 2023. But the achievement is only one step in an aggressive agenda boosted by billions of dollars in investments across the industry. IBM’s newest quantum-computing chip, revealed on 15 November, established a milestone of sorts: it packs in 127 quantum bits (qubits), making it the first such device to reach 3 digits. The innards of an IBM quantum computer show the tangle of cables used to control and read out its qubits.

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