IBM Unveils Two Quantum Chips, With Hopes of a Working Quantum Computer by 2029

Friday - December 8 2023, 03:39 UTC - 11 months ago

This week, IBM announced two new quantum processors and the launch of their System Two, containing three Condor chips. IBM will focus on getting the most out of the qubits it has, emphasizing speed and minimal error-prone. IBM also hopes to create a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029 and have already achieved several milestones.

This week, IBM announced a pair of shiny new quantum computers. The company's Condor processor is the first quantum chip of its kind with over 1,000 qubits, a feat that would have made big headlines just a few years ago. But earlier this year, a startup, Atom Computing, unveiled a 1,180-qubit quantum computer using a different approach. And although IBM says Condor demonstrates it can reliably produce high-quality qubits at scale, it'll likely be the largest single chip the company makes until sometime next decade. Instead of growing the number of qubits crammed onto each chip, IBM will focus on getting the most out of the qubits it has. In this respect, the second chip announced, Heron, is the future.

Though Heron has fewer qubits than Condor—just 133—it's significantly faster and less error-prone. The company plans to combine several of these smaller chips into increasingly more powerful systems, a bit like the multicore processors powering smartphones. The first of these, System Two, also announced this week, contains three linked Condor chips.

IBM also updated its quantum roadmap, a timeline of key engineering milestones, through 2033. Notably, the company is aiming to complete a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The machine won't be large enough to run complex quantum algorithms, like the one expected to one day break standard encryption. Still, it's a bold promise.

Quantum Correction .

Practical quantum computers will be able to tackle problems that can't be solved using classical computers. But today's systems are far too small and error-ridden to realize that dream. To get there, engineers are working on a solution called error-correction.

A qubit is the fundamental unit of a quantum computer. In your laptop, the basic unit of information is a 1 or 0 represented by a transistor that's either on or off. In a quantum computer, the unit of information is 1, 0, or—thanks to quantum weirdness—some combination of the two. The physical component can be an atom, electron, or tiny superconducting loop of wire.

Opting for the latter, IBM makes its quantum computers by cooling loops of wire, or transmons, to temperatures near absolute zero and placing them into quantum states. Here's the problem. Qubits are incredibly fragile, easily falling out of these quantum states throughout a calculation. This introduces errors that make today's machines unreliable.

One way to solve this problem is to minimize errors. IBM's made progress here. Heron uses some new hardware to significantly speed up how quickly the system places pairs of qubits into quantum states—an operation known as a "gate"—limiting the number of errors that crop up and spread to neighboring qubits (researchers call this "crosstalk").

"It's a beautiful device," Gambetta told Ars Technica. "It's five times better than the previous devices, the errors are way less, [and] crosstalk can't really be measured." .

But you can't totally eliminate errors. In the future, redundancy will also be key. By spreading information across many qubits, with multiple pairs calculating the same answer, engineers can assemble the correct result from a majority of yes-or-no answers.

Such a system, known as a fault-tolerant quantum computer, could satisfy the requirements of certificated quantum computing. Right now, that remains an unproven concept, though IBM's ticking off milestone after milestone.

The company has already more than doubled the number of qubits packed into its Condor chip. This week's announcements suggest that, when it comes to engineering its own devices, IBM is in a class above many of its rivals.

TLDR: This week, IBM announced two new quantum processors and the launch of their System Two, containing three Condor chips. IBM will focus on getting the most out of the qubits it has, emphasizing speed and minimal error-prone. IBM also hopes to create a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029 and have already achieved several milestones.