The U.S. quantum computer may have made a revolutionary breakthrough, IBM yesterday (December 4) officially launched the third generation of quantum chip Heron, as well as the Heron-based IBM Quantum System 2 (IBM Quantum System Two), the world's first modular practical quantum computer. In a 60-minute special program on CBS, Dario Gill, senior vice president and research director of IBM, declared: "At this moment, we feel like we are in the forties and fifties of the last century, and the pioneers are building the first electronic computer. Host Scott Paley said, "I hope we can explain it more clearly today, so that you will not be caught off guard by a breakthrough that could change human civilization."
To put it simply, at the IBM Quantum Summit held yesterday, IBM released two quantum chips, a quantum computer, a quantum programming software, an AI model of automatic quantum programming and a quantum computer development roadmap for the next 10 years.
IBM Condor quantum chip (1121 qubits)
Condor is a 1121-qubit superconducting quantum chip based on cross-resonant gate technology, which is the world's first quantum processor with more than 1000 qubits. Previously, IBM has released two quantum chips, Eagle (127-qubit) and Osprey (Osprey, 433-qubit), Condor has increased the qubit density by 50%, but the performance is comparable to the previous 433-qubit Osprey. This means that more qubits can be accommodated in the same area, which is of great significance for improving the performance and scalability of quantum computers.
Conder's single dilution cooler contains more than a mile of high-density, cryogenic flexible IO cabling that pushes the limits of scale and throughput in chip designs, and is a landmark innovation that solves the problem of scale and informs future hardware designs.
IBM Quantum Heron Quantum Chip (133 qubits)
Heron is IBM's latest third-generation quantum chip, the quantum chip with the highest performance indicators of IBM so far, and the cornerstone of IBM's future quantum computer. Some people may think that the number of qubits has decreased, how can it still have the highest performance, or the cornerstone?
Heron is IBM's next-generation architecture processor with 133 fixed-frequency qubits and a tunable coupler that delivers a 3-5x performance increase and a 5x reduction in error rate compared to the previous 127-qubit Eagle, almost completely eliminating crosstalk. Crosstalk is when the state of one qubit is disturbed by other qubits, which can negatively affect the accuracy of quantum computing. The Heron chip virtually eliminates this crosstalk, which means it is more accurate and reliable when performing quantum calculations.
And through Heron, IBM has also developed a new qubit and quantum gate technology, the so-called quantum gate technology, which is the manipulation technology of qubits, which is the basis of IBM's future hardware roadmap.
The architecture of the Heron processor means that multiple quantum chips can be connected to each other to build a modular quantum computer, which means that IBM can scale up the quantum computer by simply increasing the number of chips, which is the biggest and most critical breakthrough of the Heron quantum processor.
IBM Quantum System Two
IBM Quantum System 2 is equipped with 3 Heron quantum chips in a laboratory located in Yorktown Heights, New York, with a width of 6.7 meters and a height of 4.6 meters, with each hexagonal unit weighing up to 9 tons. The Heron chip is about the same size as a laptop chip, so why is a quantum computer so large and heavy?
Most of this volume and weight is brought by the cooling system, and the quantum computers of IBM and Google both use the Josephson junction as the superconducting qubit, which needs to dilute the ultra-cold superfluid provided by the refrigerator to cool to less than 15mk, and operate completely in a vacuum environment, so as to ensure the quantum mechanical effect of the superconductor. Dilution refrigerators require helium-3, a byproduct of nuclear research and programs, which is often tightly controlled by the government and very expensive, to be cooled. However, I saw a report by Xinhua News Agency in 2021 that the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully developed a helium-free dilution refrigerator, which can achieve extremely low temperatures below 10MK.
The Josephson junction is like a sandwich, consisting of two superconductors sandwiched between an insulating layer, and when electrons pass through the superconductor at low temperatures, they pair up to form Cooper pairs, which can be quantum tunneled through the insulating layer. By emitting microwave photons into the Josephson junction, it is possible to manipulate them and save, change, and read out information about individual qubits. The superconducting cables that make the Josephson junction require a special design with minimal heat transfer to avoid destroying the subtle quantum states of the qubits inside the chiller, which Wikipedia says can only be made by the Japanese company Coax and is very difficult to obtain.
The highlight of IBM's release is IBM Quantum System 2, a modular quantum computing architecture for utility-scale work that leverages parallelism, concurrent quantum, classical computing, and dynamic circuit execution to enable quantum-centric supercomputing. The biggest breakthrough of IBM Quantum System 2 is its hexagonal modular design, which is easy to expand to the connection of multiple quantum processors, thus forming a larger quantum computer, which is of great significance for realizing large-scale quantum computing and supports all IBM quantum chips in the future.
Qiskit 1.0 released
Qiskit 1.0 is the world's most widely used open-source quantum programming software, and Qiskit 1.0 has released a number of new features that can help computational scientists build and run quantum algorithms easily and quickly, including a new quantum circuit simulator, a new quantum circuit editor, and a new quantum circuit actuator to help drive the adoption and adoption of quantum computing.
Generative AI auto-coding
IBM also showcased a generative AI model that leverages the WatsonX AI platform to generate quantum code, which can be used to automate quantum code development and optimize quantum circuits, helping to improve the efficiency and automation of quantum computing.
IBM's roadmap for quantum development over the next decade
At the summit, IBM also released a roadmap for quantum development over the next decade. In the future, priority will be given to improvements in gate operation to improve the quality of advanced error correction systems rather than making the number of qubits more. IBM hopes to enable Heron to start with 5,000 door operations by 2024, achieve a breakthrough of 100 million by 2029, and 1 billion by 2033.
Error-correcting systems are a key component of quantum computing systems, because the quantum state of the qubit is extremely fragile, and any small change in the surrounding environment, including the system's lattice vibration and background thermonuclear spin, can cause the quantum state to be destroyed, which is called decoherence, so the whole system needs to be cooled to within 20mK. But even then, the coherence time of quantum states can only be maintained between nanoseconds and seconds, which leads to the increase and accumulation of errors, which requires quantum error correction for practical quantum computing.
IBM is developing a variety of software and hardware to achieve error correction, and Heron's performance has improved thanks to a new error correction strategy called quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC), which uses multiple physical qubits to represent a quantum information bit, called logical qubits, which can accommodate some qLDPC-corrected qubits in about 400 physical qubits, and then connect these chips together to greatly reduce the error rate.
So look at it, the world's first electronic computer covers an area of 170 square meters and weighs 30 tons, and IBM Quantum System 2 also covers an area of tens of square meters and weighs 9 tons, so IBM says that it is like going back to the forties and fifties of the last century, and the first electronic computer is being built is really vivid.
Decades ago, electronic computers completely changed human civilization, and today quantum computers may also change human civilization again, coupled with artificial intelligence, starships, so we may really be on the eve of a great change in civilization now.
It's just that electronic computers have been used for decades from the size of a building to fit on a desktop, and quantum computers may not last that long. On CBS's show, host Paley asked Hartmut Nevin, Google's vice president of engineering and head of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, when humanity would be able to build a true quantum computer system, which Nevin said would be at the end of the decade, before 2030. Dario Gill, vice president of IBM, also said that he is confident that this goal will be achieved within five years.
In addition, the mainland's Qike Quantum released the "Tiansuan No. 1" modular ion trap quantum computing engineering machine this year, Bose Quantum released the 100-chain-bit "Tiangong Quantum Brain" optical quantum computer, and the 255-qubit "Jiuzhan No. 3" optical quantum computer released by the University of Science and Technology of China in October has reached the first milestone in quantum computing research: quantum supremacy. However, these are different from IBM, Google's superconducting qubit route, China to take the superconducting quantum route is the Chinese Academy of Sciences' origin quantum, in January this year has delivered the first 24-qubit superconducting quantum computer, before the end of the year is expected to release a new model, 2025 to reach 1024 qubits.
It remains to be seen which path will ultimately succeed.