IBM announced that it has built the world’s largest superconducting quantum computer.
The American company IBM said it has built a new quantum computer called the Eagle. The superconducting machine is bigger than Google’s Sycamore, as well as the Chinese computer Jiuzhang 2.
Earlier in October, researchers at the China University of Science and Technology (USTC) announced that their Jiuzhang 2 quantum computer uses 60 superconducting qubits and is 10 million times faster than Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. Now the American IT giant has announced that the new IBM Eagle processor doubles the Jiuzhang 2 by using 127 qubits to solve computational problems.
Prior to that, in 2019, Google announced quantum supremacy when it developed the Sycamore processor. It uses the same superconducting architecture as the new Eagle processor and China’s Jiuzhang 2. However, IBM previously disputed Google’s claim that the company had achieved quantum supremacy. The company said that Sycamore was given less difficult tasks.
Now the 127-qubit IBM Eagle processor is, in theory, the most powerful quantum computer in the world. Although he still has many trials to go through. Unlike Google and the Chinese USTC, IBM has not released an academic paper detailing the tests it ran on its quantum computer to demonstrate performance. The number of qubits is not everything when it comes to quantum computing power. Jiuzhang 2, for example, only had 66 qubits, but is 10 million times faster than Google’s 54-qubit Sycamore, in part due to the use of light photons.
