BBC Radio 4<\/a>, Dr Ballance said quantum computers were “the most powerful form of computer allowed by the laws of physics”.<\/p>\n“The hardware is fundamentally very different,” he said.<\/p>\n
“[It] just calculates problems in a very different way and a conventional computer is much closer to an abacus in conventional compute power than it is to a quantum computer.”<\/p>\n
The company said the delivery marked “a significant step forward in making commercially valuable quantum computing a reality” and “ensuring the UK is equipped with the compute power to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges”.<\/p>\n
“For that right now, if you want to build a better battery, you mostly have to go into a lab and test out some chemicals,” Dr Ballance said.<\/p>\n
“Those kind of problems we’ve known for 50 years how to write down – we just can’t solve them on conventional computers. <\/p>\n
“And quantum computers will allow us to take a lot of that work from the lab into a problem we can now solve on a computer.”<\/p>\n
He said a conventional supercomputer “might use the output of a small power plant to power it”. <\/p>\n
“Our quantum computer uses less power than an electric kettle.<\/p>\n
“The systems we’re building next year, which will outperform … the largest supercomputers humanity will ever build, will still use less power than just one server rack in a standard data centre.”<\/p>\n
Dr Ballance said they had accepted the IonQ deal “because the business logic was incredible”.<\/p>\n
“IonQ has an amazing team and they’ve had quantum computers operated on major cloud platforms since before I founded Oxford Ionic. <\/p>\n
“We have this new core technology and plugging those things together jointly allows us to speed up our combined roadmaps by multiple years.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new state-of-the-art quantum computer said to be the most advanced in the world has just been switched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[64,63,257,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-70487","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}