Everyone wants to build the first machine that does something useful<\/p>\n
The long-held fantasy of quantum computing is now looking more like a knuckle-busting engineering war.<\/p>\n
IBM reckons it\u2019s finally nailed the architecture. In June it laid out a new blueprint that plugs the holes in its earlier plans and claims it can build a proper quantum computer before the decade\u2019s up.<\/p>\n
IBM quantum boss Jay Gambetta said: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel like a dream anymore. I really do feel like we\u2019ve cracked the code and we\u2019ll be able to build this machine by the end of the decade.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google isn\u2019t taking that lying down. It claims to have bulldozed one of the last major hurdles and says its hardware is also on track.<\/p>\n
Google Quantum AI Julian Kelly said: \u201cAll the [remaining] engineering and scientific challenges are surmountable.”<\/p>\n
But just because the quantum physics bit might be sorted doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s all downhill from here. There\u2019s still a mountain of tedious, soul-destroying engineering to do.<\/p>\n
Amazon Web Services executive Oskar Painter doesn\u2019t expect anything useful for at least 15\u201330 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should not underestimate that engineering effort to scale,\u201d he said, pouring cold helium on the hype.<\/p>\n
Making this work means going from a couple hundred qubits to a million or more. These twitchy units only stay useful for fractions of a second before falling apart into noise and gibberish.<\/p>\n
IBM\u2019s experimental Condor chip, which packed in 433 qubits, ended up suffering from \u201ccrosstalk\u201d between components.<\/p>\n
Rigetti Computing chief executiv Subodh Kulkarni, called it \u201ca bizarre effect we can\u2019t control anymore… that\u2019s a nasty physics problem to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n
IBM says it was ready for the interference and has moved to a different qubit coupler to reduce the mess. Manually tuning qubits, which worked at small scale, clearly isn\u2019t viable once you scale up.<\/p>\n
Google wants to slash component costs by 90 per cent to get its total machine budget to $1 billion (\u20ac920 million). It\u2019s also made the most noise about error correction, which creates redundancy by copying data across multiple qubits.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you scale without error correction, you get a very expensive machine that outputs noise… and does not provide any value at all,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n
IBM isn\u2019t sold on Google\u2019s surface code approach, which connects qubits in a 2D grid and needs more than one million of them to work. Microsoft has already walked away from that idea, calling it too messy.<\/p>\n
Instead, IBM is going for low-density parity-check codes, which supposedly require 90 per cent fewer qubits. The catch is they need longer-range connections between distant qubits, which are a bastard to make stable.<\/p>\n
Kelly said the new design \u201cadds new levels of complexity\u201d to an already unmanageable beast. IBM insists it\u2019s finally cracked those long connectors, though.<\/p>\n
Gartner analyst Mark Horvath said IBM\u2019s machine design might work, but right now it\u2019s just drawings. \u201cThey need to show they can manufacture chips that can do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Beyond the qubits, the real fight is untangling the spaghetti of wiring, fitting components onto a single chip, then stacking those into modules. All of it needs to be shoved into massive fridges hovering near absolute zero.<\/p>\n
While superconducting qubits show the most progress, they\u2019re also fragile and hard to manage. Alternatives using trapped ions, photons, or neutral atoms are more stable but face other problems like slower speeds and poor connectivity.<\/p>\n
Universal Quantum chief executive Sebastian Weid said governments will end up backing specific tech stacks, narrowing the field to a few survivors who can go the distance.<\/p>\n
US defence tech outfit Darpa is already sniffing around trying to spot winners. Meanwhile, several companies have started showing off exotic new qubit designs, some even claiming new states of matter might be the key.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s years off, but the old-school superconducting crew aren\u2019t slowing down. \u201cJust because it\u2019s hard, doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be done,\u201d said Horvath, summing up the grim optimism driving the whole show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everyone wants to build the first machine that does something useful The long-held fantasy of quantum computing is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[21595,4323,34790,844,2474,696,2800,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-66014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-computing","tag-amazon-web-services","tag-computing","tag-gartner","tag-google","tag-ibm","tag-microsoft","tag-quantum","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}