Microsoft Says It Will Build a Quantum Supercomputer Within Ten Years
upstart writes:
Microsoft Says It Will Build a Quantum Supercomputer Within Ten Years:
Microsoft yesterday announced its very own roadmap towards building a quantum supercomputer, crystallizing its path along the company's years-long research into topological qubits. Just last year, Microsoft had the breakthrough it "bet" would pay-off out of its research into topological qubits, an (even more) exotic qubit type than usual. Now, the company is saying it can get from the research breakthrough towards a functional quantum supercomputer in less than a decade.
[...] Now, that's. quite an aggressive "roadmap". Of course, Microsoft has been on the road it has publicly committed to for a while now - the company has advanced its research into quantum computing in numerous other areas, even with the lack of a single, coherent, topological qubit being shown until last year. There are many areas of quantum computing that could be worked on while Microsoft waited for its topological qubits to come to pass - such as control mechanisms, noise reduction, deployment, and others. Areas where the company's research was already aligned with the certainty that they'd actually be able to produce, entangle, and keep them coherent.
"Today, we're really at this foundational implementation level," Svore told TechCrunch. "We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They're built around physical qubits and they're not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit."
Essentially, Microsoft has to do the same work that other companies have been doing on their own qubits: Microsoft has to scale the number of qubits it can deploy; it has to make sure those qubits are resilient (stable) so they can be used for complex calculations; and it has to find ways to reduce the error rate. Microsoft expects it will achieve its quantum supercomputer once it can reach a rate of one million quantum operations per second, with a failure rate of one per trillion operations.
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