IBM on Monday said it has designed a new quantum computing chip that its executives believe will let quantum systems start to outperform classical computers at some tasks within the next two years.
IBM said that its “Eagle” computing chip has 127 so-called “qubits”, which can represent information in quantum form. Classical computers work using “bits” that must be either a 1 or 0, but qubits can be both a 1 and a 0 simultaneously.
That fact could one day make quantum computers much faster than their classical counterparts, but qubits are exceedingly hard to build and require huge cryogenic refrigerators to operate correctly. While Apple’s newest M1 Max chip has 57 billion transistors — a rough proxy for bits — IBM says that its new Eagle chip is the first to have more than 100 qubits.
To read more, click here.