IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will release thousands of quantum computers over the next three years.
Talk to Reuters ahead of his Think conference, Krishna said devices slated to go on sale in 2025 will have over 4,000 qubits of computing power. To put this into perspective, today’s machines have some 127 qubits.
Explaining in more detail what such a device would be able to do, Krishna said it would be able to optimize the routing of truck fleets or improve financial risk modeling. To meet these challenges with traditional computing hardware, he says, would require a machine “the size of this planet.”
walk carefully
Krishna also touched on the subject of the company’s overhyped AI Watson which ultimately delivered results in healthcare and other industries, a bit slower than expected.
Building quantum computers is a more difficult task than developing artificial intelligence (AI), he added. “We may have hype some things,” Krishna said. “This time we are trying to respect the line with caution.”
At the end of January 2022, IBM published a research paper, explaining how difficult it was to build quantum computing devices. The article proposes a method to increase the applications available for quantum power.
“Quantum computers show promise for simulations of chemical and physical systems, but the limited capabilities of current quantum processors allow only small, often approximate simulations,” IBM said in the article.
The solution, the company says, is to combine classical and quantum computing power, a process called “tangle forging.” If successful, the system can double the size of available quantum computations.
Quantum is a nascent technology, but with great potential. Simply put, quantum computing goes beyond binary processing (where everything is one or zero) and can enable states between these two poles, making the eventual computer more powerful in the process.
Via: Reuters