Amazon Says Its New Quantum Computing Chip Will Make Error Correction More Efficient

Amazon is making its foray into quantum computing pinch nan motorboat of a caller spot designed to make quantum correction correction overmuch efficient. In an announcement connected Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said nan chip, called Ocelot, tin “reduce nan costs of implementing quantum correction correction by up to 90%, compared to existent approaches.”

Quantum computing errors are 1 of nan biggest challenges successful nan industry. Unlike accepted computers, quantum computing replaces binary 1s and 0s pinch qubits, a information that tin beryllium successful aggregate states astatine nan aforesaid time. As noted by Amazon, qubits are “sensitive to nan smallest changes, aliases ‘noise’ successful their environment,” specified arsenic vibrations, heat, and electromagnetic interference, making it “extremely challenging to build quantum computers that tin execute reliable, error-free calculations of immoderate important complexity.”

Instead of adding overmuch qubits to correct these errors, Amazon built correction correction into its Ocelot spot pinch what it calls “cat qubits” (named aft nan Schrödinger’s feline experiment). These qubits are expected to trim nan magnitude of powerfulness and resources utilized for quantum correction correction arsenic they “intrinsically suppress” definite kinds of errors.

“We didn’t return an existing architecture and past effort to incorporated correction correction afterwards,” Oskar Painter, Amazon Web Services’ caput of quantum hardware, said successful nan spot release. “We selected our qubit and architecture pinch quantum correction correction arsenic nan apical requirement.”

The onslaught differs from what Google and Microsoft are doing to trim errors successful quantum computing. In December, Google announced its Willow quantum computing chip, which tin execute a computing business successful small than 5 minutes. The company’s researchers too recovered that introducing overmuch qubits into nan strategy tin thief trim errors. Meanwhile, Microsoft precocious announced its Majorana 1 quantum computing processor, which it claims tin “scale to a cardinal qubits connected a azygous chip” while reducing errors.

Amazon says its Ocelot spot is still a prototype, but nan chip’s overmuch businesslike architecture could perchance fto for smaller quantum computers that usage small resources.