(Worthy Insights) – Microsoft announced Wednesday that it has invented an entirely new kind of quantum computer. Its new quantum chip, Majorana 1, is a quantum processor analogous to transistors in classical computers’ semiconductor chips and offers a path to million-qubit systems in a single relatively small quantum computing fridge.
Intriguingly, Microsoft essentially created a new state of matter, a topological superconductor, to make this happen. Microsoft believes that this development, 19 years in the making, will enable the construction of commercially usable and viable quantum computers within five years.
“We’ll have a fault tolerant quantum computer, a real fault tolerant quantum computer in years, not decades,” says Dr. Chetan Nayak, who runs the quantum hardware program at Microsoft and has been working on this problem for almost two decades. “And once we have that, that’s the thing we’re going to build on to get out to utility scale.” [ Source (Read More…) ]