Google's Quantum Computer Is 100 Million Times Faster Than Your Laptop

More information regarding Google's quantum computing project, which it manages in collaboration with NASA, has been released recently. The tech business claims that its enormous D-Wave 2X quantum computing machine has been able to solve algorithms 100,000,000 times faster than a conventional computer chip, which might significantly alter the amount of processing power available to us in the future.

Instead of being set to 1 or 0, as typical electrical bits are, quantum bits (also known as "qubits") can concurrently contain values of 1, 0, or both in quantum computing, which is closely related to quantum physics. As additional qubits are added, the processing capability becomes exponentially more powerful. Qubits are microscopic particles trapped in temperatures slightly above absolute zero. With the help of quantum computing, big data issues like weather forecasts or chemical analysis might be resolved considerably more quickly.

To the best of our knowledge, we're not quite there yet, but Google's announcement is another step toward making quantum computing a reality, which can have a significant influence on technological and scientific research. It also serves as justification for the work D-Wave has been conducting with the computers it has sold to organisations like Lockheed Martin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as Jordan Novet of VentureBeat notes.

It can be challenging to comprehend the new developments without a background in physics and a command of technical jargon, but in essence, researchers ran simulations of tests on conventional computer chips and compared their capabilities to the D-Wave 2X when performing the same calculations; this is where the 100 million speed increase was noted.

Although it is a staggering number, the age of quantum computing is yet some time off. As Google's Hartmut Neven notes on the company's blog, "While these results are exciting and highly encouraging, there is more work ahead to transform quantum enhanced optimisation into a viable solution." The team's research has also been the subject of a study.

Theoretical quantum computing is fine, but we haven't seen any real-world evidence that these concepts can be put to use. Not everyone is sure that the D-Wave 2X is a real quantum computer, as Gizmodo points out; there is also some debate on the effectiveness of the algorithms employed in Google's simulation of the conventional computer chip, which may have been further optimised.

While experts dispute the relative benefits of this specific supercomputer, Google is joined by companies like IBM and Microsoft in the quest to decipher the secrets of quantum computing. Microsoft predicts that a functioning quantum computer will be available within the next ten years, however D-Wave continues to insist that the required technology is now available.