In many new technologies, quantum computing is clearly a powerful competitor.
'Our investment is just a beginning, and we will need hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.' Intel’s senior vice president, chief technology officer and director of the Intel Research Institute Michael Mayberry said in an interview with a CFA reporter on the 30th that current quantum computing still The first mile of a marathon run takes ten years to actually commercialize.
But this does not affect the global tech giant's huge investment in quantum computing. As the core of the next technological revolution, the power of quantum computing is considered to far exceed that of supercomputers.
John Prieskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, pointed out that the current supercomputer system can accomplish 5 to 20 qubit quantum computers, but after reaching 49 qubits, the quantum computer can It appears. In simple terms, traditional computing can solve data problems for decades. Quantum computing may take only 1 second to get.
At this year's CES in the United States, Intel CEO Krzyzewski officially demonstrated the progress of quantum computing to the outside world, and announced the delivery of the first 49-qubit quantum computing test chip to a partner. This was in line with the company’s delivery of 17 qubits in October last year. The test chip only lasted about 3 months.
'At present, Intel is still testing the features of the product, hoping to enhance the performance of the second version, and will see the latest progress in this area in the second half. 'MichaelMayberry told reporters that Intel's development of the technology is not obsessed with ' The number of error corrections is rather important for the correction of qubits, what kind of operations and operational stability can be done above, such as drug development, financial modeling and weather forecasting.
Breakthrough Traditional Computing 'Restricted Area' When you measure a tiny electron, it affects the state of another electron in the distance. Einstein called the entanglement and superposition of quantum as a “ghost-like superposition effect.” Even for the smartest people in the world. That said, quantum mechanics also looks like magic.
Quantum computing can bring extremely high computational speed, a very sensitive detector, and can create unbreakable encryption functions to protect important digital information. MichaelMayberry told reporters that quantum computing is an exciting new computing model. Different from current data centers, cloud environments, PCs and other devices in digital computing. Digital computing requires the data to be encoded as binary digits (bits), with each bit in one of two defined states (0 or 1). However, quantum computing uses qubits, which can be in multiple states at the same time. Therefore, operations on qubits can achieve large amounts of computation in parallel.
In essence, quantum computing is the ultimate goal of parallel computing and has enormous potential for overcoming traditional computer problems. For example, quantum computers can simulate the natural environment to advance scientific research in areas such as chemistry, materials science, and molecular modeling.
'The power of quantum computers can really deal with the complexity of the molecules or materials we want to understand.' Michael Mayberry told reporters.
In order to unlock the potential of quantum computing, Intel launched a collaborative research project in 2015 with the goal of developing commercially viable quantum computing systems.
Although significant progress has been made, quantum computing research is still in its infancy. For example, it is not yet known which form the quantum processor (or qubit) will adopt. This is why Intel has to bet several directions and They are equally invested. One of the possible forms is superconducting qubits. Intel has made rapid progress in the development of such test chips. Other manufacturers and institutions in the industry and academia are also pursuing such programs. Based on their own silicon transistors Manufacturing expertise, Intel is also working on another alternative structure. This alternative architecture is called 'spin qubit', which runs on silicon and can overcome some of the hurdles of quantum computing from research to practicality. For the technical research personnel, a very important responsibility is to judge and look forward to the future development direction of technology. So before Intel as a company decided to invest heavily in cutting-edge technologies, we have found some of us from the perspective of researchers. Think of the direction worth investing in, such as artificial intelligence, driverless, and of course we have as researchers There may be some deviation in the directional prediction, but I think that even if there may be such a mistake in judgment, this risk is still worth taking. Especially when we make the frontier judgments and the whole The company's development direction is consistent, and it is very gratifying to get the company's overall support. 'MichaelMayberry told reporters.
He said that from a research perspective, R&D personnel will make a judgement on the items that may be considered, and basically one of the four potential projects will be selected last, which is a quarter proportion. If this is a quarter The ratio was verified to be valuable, and subsequent development companies will keep up.
It takes a decade to commercialize From the United States to Europe, from the top scientific research institutions to the giants of technology companies, the research around quantum technology has been fully carried out, and the new round of scientific and technological competition triggered by the quantum revolution is in full swing.
For example, Google announced the launch of 49 qubit processors in April 2017. Google’s chief scientist, John Martinis, has publicly stated that: To lead the way to 'Quantum Hegemony', his team is using a 49-qubit simulation system to overcome classic computers that cannot be solved. Puzzles.
Six months later, IBM Corporation of the United States took the lead in announcing the successful development of a 20-qubit processor and the introduction of a 50-qubit, so-called quantum computing prototype. It is hoped that the first quantum computing application in the financial sector will be launched by 2021. It is undoubtedly a challenge to Google's 'quantum hegemony' algorithm. On the other hand, IBM has not yet published the detailed performance and test results of the 'quantum computing prototype'.
Subsequently, Microsoft also launched its general-purpose quantum computing R&D program and full-stack development and simulator. Although hardware devices have not yet been publicly displayed, IonQ, Quantum Circuits and other companies and the Japanese Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) are also investing in hardware development, but they have not yet Announced R&D results.
And the government’s investment has continued to increase.
The United States is advancing the construction of quantum information science disciplines in theory and developing high-performance computing systems in applied technologies. At present, both of these tasks have been upgraded to the national strategic level. The government investment has reached 350 million US dollars annually.
Facing global companies and the government’s investment in quantum computing, Michael Mayberry told CCP reporters that quantum computing is more like a marathon. It is still in the first mile. No matter what the direction, the ultimate destination It's the same, and now Intel is not obsessed with the number of tangled issues. From 17 to 49, Intel still values error correction capabilities. He stated that Intel's future investment will be on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is just a company's Put in.
'Our view is that it takes a decade for quantum computing to actually use commercialization, so we still have a long way to go. This 10-year vision is currently far from us. But we can use quantum computing first. It is difficult to solve the problem that conventional calculations can solve. If this kind of problem is solved, it will bring about tremendous changes to our entire world. For example, we may use quantum computing to develop a catalyst that can change The fuel structure used by the car or it can capture the carbon dioxide in the air, and if this can be done it will revolutionize the big problem of climate change.' Michael Mayberry said.
He believes that the challenge comes mainly from four aspects. 'The first one is that regardless of how well Qubit is doing, we think it is still not good enough to be perfect, so we need to do some work in error correction to ensure that Qubit has It has a long enough lifetime to grow until it can complete some meaningful algorithms or calculations. The second is that we need to have local control over Qubit, and not that this control is to be carried out remotely by long cables. Control, what we need is to control it locally. The third is the arrangement on the path. How can we really put these Qubits into a physical Qubit system? How do we give it a route and make an algorithm? Sometimes it is straightforward. Sometimes it is to jump. The fourth one is the connection between Qubit, because we need to connect Qubit to form a larger system with larger scale. Now we may have There are thousands of Qubits, but it's a big challenge to be able to connect these thousands of Qubits. So I said there are four technical challenges. 'Michael Mayberry said.
'Our ultimate goal is to create a commercial quantum computer that can be used by governments and industries to meet the challenges of big data.' Intel previously mentioned in the reply to CBN that the problem of quantum computing distance to solve project scale may also be It takes 5 to 7 years. From a business perspective, quantum computing may require 1 million or more qubits to be of practical value.