Google Quantum Computer Leaves Old-school Supercomputer In The Dust

id="article-body" class="row" section="article-body">




Google's Sycamore chip powers a quantum computer

Google

A Google quantum computer has far outpaced ordinary computing technology, an achievement called quantum supremacy that's an important milestone for a revolutionary way of processing data. Google disclosed the results in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The achievement came after more than a decade of work at Google, including the use of its own quantum computing chip, called Sycamore.

"Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output," Google researchers said in a blog post about the work.

The news, which leaked into the limelight in September with a premature paper publication, kynghidongduong.vn offers evidence that quantum computers could break out of research labs and head toward mainstream computing. They could perform important work like creating new materials, designing new drugs at the molecular level, optimizing financial investments and speeding up delivery of packages. And the quantum computing achievement comes as progress with classical computers, as measured by the speed of general-purpose processors and charted by Moore's Law, has sputtered.


Google's Sputnik moment

Google got to pick its speed test, but Hartmut Neven, one of the researchers, dismissed criticisms that the result is only a narrow victory.

"Sputnik didn't do much either. It circled the Earth. Yet it was the start of the space age," Neven said at a press conference. He spoke at Google's quantum computing lab near Santa Barbara, California, next to the site of an actual Space Race milestone -- the development of the Apollo missions' lunar rover.

But it's not the beginning of the end for classical computers, at least in the view of today's quantum computing experts. Quantum computers are finicky, tour hà giang giá rẻ exotic and have to run in an extremely controlled environment, and tour hà giang they're not likely to replace most of what we do today on classical computers.