Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, user tech, crypto, societal media, and overmuch more. Previously, she was a writer and editor astatine MUO.
Amazon is making its foray into quantum computing pinch the motorboat of a caller spot designed to make quantum correction correction much efficient. In an announcement connected Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said the chip, called Ocelot, tin “reduce the costs of implementing quantum correction correction by up to 90%, compared to existent approaches.”
Quantum computing errors are 1 of the biggest challenges successful the industry. Unlike accepted computers, quantum computing replaces binary 1s and 0s pinch qubits, a portion that tin beryllium successful aggregate states astatine the aforesaid time. As noted by Amazon, qubits are “sensitive to the 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 much qubits to correct these errors, Amazon built correction correction into its Ocelot spot pinch what it calls “cat qubits” (named aft the Schrödinger’s feline experiment). These qubits are expected to trim the magnitude of power 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’ head of quantum hardware, said successful the property release. “We selected our qubit and architecture pinch quantum correction correction arsenic the apical requirement.”
The attack 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 situation successful little than 5 minutes. The company’s researchers besides recovered that introducing much qubits into the 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 the chip’s much businesslike architecture could perchance let for smaller quantum computers that usage little resources.