International Business Machines Corp on Wednesday said it launched its most remarkable quantum computer to date called the Osprey, a 433-qubit machine that has three times the quantity of qubits than its Eagle machine reported the year before.
The quantity of qubits, or quantum bits, are a sign of the power of the quantum computer which uses quantum mechanics, albeit different quantum computer organizations make various cases about the power of their qubits which can be made a wide range of ways.
Quantum computers are one day expected to accelerate specific calculations a great many times faster than the fastest supercomputers today.
Dario Gil, IBM’s director of research, said IBM is still on track to launch a computer with more than 1000 qubits however for additional scaling was dealing with a new methodology.
“As we push the limits of the size of the Osprey chip that we’re announcing, if you look at it, it’s really big already. Next year, 1000 is going to be very big,” he said. “So after that, we have been designing and engineering the whole architecture for quantum computing based on modularity.”
IBM is calling the modular system Quantum System Two.
“Quantum System Two is the first truly modular quantum computing system so that you can continue to scale to larger and larger systems over time,” Gil told Reuters ahead of the IBM Quantum Summit this week. “Modularity means the chips themselves are going to have to be interconnected to one another.”
IBM said it is targeting for this system to be online by end of the next year and it would be the building blocks for “quantum-centric supercomputing” by associating various Quantum System Twos. IBM said it could construct a system with up to 16,632 qubits by linking three of these systems.
IBM has north of 20 quantum computers around the world, and customers can get to them through the cloud.
