Quantum Computer vs Super Computers | Only 200 Qubits Can Operate 9,000 Times Faster Than Supercomputer

Simply Quantum Computers are much much faster than current regular computers. But Why?

We don’t need to deep dive into all scientific and technicalities concepts and theories. Just remember that Quantum Computers are using Qubits instead of normal Bits. A Bit is a binary digit, the smallest increment of data on a computer. A Bit can hold only one of two values: 0 or 1, corresponding to the electrical values of off or on, respectively.

But why is Qubit faster? Because Qubits are Multitasking Masters.
A Qubit is not limited like regular binary bits to two states. It can have many states, and it’s this which gives the quantum computer its exponential processing power. This effect of superposition allows a Qubit to perform many times more calculations at once.

How Are Quantum Computers Working?

To understand this, it’s best first to look at how a classical or regular computer works. It will contain a processor which manipulates strings made up of bits. These bits can only have a value of either 0 or 1, depending on the electrical charge applied to them. A pair of bits can produce four values: 10, 01, 00, and 11. With three bits you get eight values. Input is added as a string of 0s and 1s, manipulated by an algorithm and then output as another long string of 0s and 1s.

A quantum computer replaces these binary bits with quantum bits – or qubits for short. These are quantum particles which contain multiple states existing simultaneously in superposition. Their information may be stored as the spin property of that particle, or its momentum, even location.
This superposed state means that the particle’s spin could be up, down, or in fact any value between.

Even as various forms of physical hardware like superconducting wires and trapped ions made progress, it was possible to find him gushing about an optical quantum computer put together by a Canadian startup called Xanadu. But, in the year since Xanadu described its hardware, companies using that other technology continued to make progress by cutting down error rates, exploring new technologies, and upping the Qubit count.

But the advantage of optical quantum computing didn’t go away, and now Xanadu is back with a reminder that it still hasn’t gone away. Thanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations with more than 200 qubits. And it has shown that simulating the behavior of just one of those operations on a supercomputer would take 9,000 years, while its optical quantum computer can do them in just a few-dozen milliseconds.

The advantages of optical-based quantum computing are considerable. Nearly all modern communications depend on optical hardware at some point, and improvements in that technology have the chance to be directly applied to quantum computing hardware. Some of the manipulations we might need can be done with hardware that’s miniaturized to the point where we can etch it onto a silicon chip. And all of the hardware can be kept at room temperature, avoiding some of the challenges of getting signals into or out of equipment that sits near absolute zero.

Xanadu appears to be convinced that these advantages are substantial enough that building a company around them makes sense. The hardware that Lee described last year relies on a single chip to put photons in a specific quantum state and then force photon pairs to interact in ways that entangle them. These interactions form the basis of Qubit manipulations that can be used to perform calculations. The photons can then be sorted based on their state, with the number of photons in each state providing an answer to the calculation.

There are challenges to scaling this technology. Since the photons can only interact in pairs, adding another photon means you have to include enough hardware features for its necessary interactions. That means that scaling the processor to a higher Qubit count involves scaling all of this hardware on the chip. It’s not a problem now, but it could easily be one as things scale through the hundreds to the thousands.

Source: Nature.com