Someone is going to commercialize a general purpose, universal quantum computer first, and Intel wants to be the first. So does Google. So does IBM. And D-Wave is pretty sure it already has done this, even if many academics and a slew of upstart competitors don’t agree. What we can all agree on is that there is a very long road ahead in the development of quantum computing, and it will be a costly endeavor that could nonetheless help solve some intractable problems.
The big news this week is that Intel has been able to take a qubit design that its engineers created alongside of those working at QuTech and scale it up to 17 qubits on a single package. A year ago, the Intel-QuTech partnership had only a few qubits on their initial devices, Jim Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, tells The Next Platform, and two years ago it had none. So that is a pretty impressive roadmap in a world where Google is testing a 20 qubit chip and hopes to have one running at 49 qubits before the year is out.
“We are trying to build a general purpose, universal quantum computer,” says Clarke. “This is not a quantum annealer, like the D-Wave machine. There are many different types of qubits, which are the devices for quantum computing, and one of the things that sets Intel apart from the other players is that we are focused on multiple qubit types. …”
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