IBM reveals prototype of its first commercial quantum computer processor

Research teams looking to crunch massive data sets have had access to IBM’s quantum processor through the cloud for about a year, and now the company is upping that power with a new generation of processors. The first, boasting 16 quantum bits (qubits), will increase the processing power available through the cloud, while the second is twice as powerful again and designed as a prototype of a commercial quantum processor.

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Gee. A computer that has 16 bits.

This’ll really give the abacus a serious competitor.

Cynic.

mollwollfumble said:

Gee. A computer that has 16 bits.

This’ll really give the abacus a serious competitor.

What?

IBM’s current cloud-accessible quantum processor is built with 5 qubits, meaning it effectively has the computing power of 32 traditional bits. With 16 qubits, the new version has the equivalent of 65,536 bits.

Tau.Neutrino said:

IBM’s current cloud-accessible quantum processor is built with 5 qubits, meaning it effectively has the computing power of 32 traditional bits. With 16 qubits, the new version has the equivalent of 65,536 bits.

Just checking that. With superdense coding 1 qubit can hold 2 classical bits.

For an NP complete problem that has a solution that takes at most n bits to encode (eg. 6 bits means solution in range 0 to 63) then a classical computer takes 2^n = 64 units of time to solve. A quantum computer would take 2^(n/2) = 8 units of time to solve, which is much better.

But n qubits is definitely not equal to 2^n bits.

mollwollfumble said:

But n qubits is definitely not equal to 2^n bits.

I think it should be noted why n qubits is worth much more than n classical bits. There are two things at play: Firstly, a qubit is a superposition of two different classical values and the weighting of each value corresponds to a single complex number (two real numbers) for a qubit. However, just as an analogue computer is limited by accuracy and precision of the values, so is the weighting of a qubit. Secondly, and most importantly, multiple qubits can be in a state of quantum entanglement with each other, which greatly expands the range of possibilities compared to the same number of classical bits.