Microsoft Corp on Wednesday unveiled a new computer chip that it says could transform everything from fighting pollution to developing new medicines, joining Google and IBM Corp in arguing that the promise of quantum computing is closer to reality.
The US-made chip, called Majorana 1, can fit in the palm of a hand, but packs a revolutionary design that Microsoft believes would solve one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing — making these super-powerful machines reliable enough for real-world use.
“We took a fresh approach and basically reinvented how quantum computers could work,” Microsoft senior scientist Chetan Nayak said.
Photo courtesy of Microsoft Corp via Reuters
The company said its breakthrough was confirmed in research published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.
The new Majorana 1 chip uses a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up than the work done by Google or IBM, which are considered leaders in the field.
While the chip represents a major advance, Microsoft acknowledges that more engineering work lies ahead before quantum computers become practical tools. However, the company said the breakthrough could make that reality possible within “years rather than decades.”
Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) last month said that quantum technology was two decades away from overtaking his company’s chips, the workhorses of artificial intelligence (AI).
Google has said that commercial quantum computing applications are only five years away, while IBM expects large-scale quantum computers to be online by 2033.
Unlike regular computers that process information as 1s and 0s, quantum computers harness the strange properties of atomic particles, measured as qubits, to potentially solve problems that would take today’s most powerful supercomputers thousands of years.
Separately, Nvidia and research partners have created what they call the largest AI system yet for biological research, the company said on Wednesday, aiming to speed up breakthroughs in medicine and genetics.
The new AI system, called Evo 2, can read and design genetic code across all forms of life. Scientists have high hopes that such AI technology would dramatically accelerate research by spotting patterns in vast amounts of data that would normally take years to analyze by hand.
The model was built using 2,000 Nvidia H100 processors on Amazon.com Inc’s cloud infrastructure.
Developed with the Arc Institute and Stanford University, Evo 2 is now freely available to scientists worldwide through Nvidia’s BioNeMo research platform.
Beyond medicine, researchers believe the technology could help create crops that better withstand climate change and develop new ways to break down pollution.
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