Google’s quantum computing division has announced that they have tested a quantum computer with 70 qubits, which is said to be 241 million times more powerful than the quantum computer with 53 qubits they presented in 2019. Google considered their 2019 quantum computer as proof of achieving quantum supremacy, which means when a quantum computer performs calculations faster than the world’s most powerful traditional computers.
The calculations performed by Google’s 2019 quantum computer, which took 6.18 seconds, could be completed by Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer. However, the calculations performed by Google’s new quantum computer with 70 qubits would take Frontier 47.2 years to compute. The researchers at Google believe that this definitively demonstrates their achievement of quantum supremacy.
It is worth mentioning that the calculations carried out by Google’s latest quantum computer are considered by some to favor quantum computers and lack practical value except for such comparisons. For now, researchers still need to develop quantum computers that can actually produce practically useful results before quantum computers potentially begin to replace today’s supercomputers. This is something that Google’s competitor, IBM, claims to have achieved, as we briefly mentioned in a previous article.
