Quantum Computer
As all of you might have heard the buzz around Quantum Computers So what is let's find out in a simple way
Image Credits: Honeywell International Inc.
Image credits Google Inc. Sycamore
We all are known to the silicon chips that run our smartphones, computers, data centers small gadgets like Mp3 players and also the car that you drive daily is having a computer to manage its engine. So virtually we are surrounded by the tech involving silicone chips in our day to day life.
So wait a minute Quantum computer or a quantum chip is not going to replace your silicon smartphone chip any time soon.
How the Quantum computer is different from the silicon chip computer
Well, silicon chip as we all know is made up of silicon a wafer, and that's a topic for some other day. But a computer has its own processing brain called a processor which is made by a wafer fabrication process and it works on binary number system zeros and ones. There are billions of transistors fabricated onto a single computer chip as of today. Also, the power-efficient processes of thinner and thinner wafers are going on for many years and as of today 2021, we can say the 5 nm fabrication process is almost going to be mainstream. Thinner the wafer better the performance and lesser the power consumption.
But in all the processor is for a mobile device or for a data server or for a supercomputer the basic building block is silicon wafer which has a lot of limitations like maximum frequency it can operate on maximum processing it can do and so on. I am simplifying the things for those of you who are not so deeply involved in the tech. The other similarity is the data processing is done in digital bits which have either 0 or 1 as a state of sending or storing the information.
Now here comes the Quantum Computer. Where processor architecture to the operating system to the way of functioning everything is different. A quantum computer on the other hand works on Qibits rather than bits. The qubits are the basic building blocks of any quantum computer just as we say for any chip-based computer that it is 32 bit or its 64 bit likewise the quantum computer's processing power depends on the qubits and higher is of course better. Now the interesting fact of the Quantum computer is that the qubits can have 0 and 1 both states at a single instance of time and also it can have the intermediate states too. This makes quantum computers special as the number of permutations and combinations that it can perform at any given instance increases immensely giving them an edge over chip-based computers.
As mentioned earlier the operating system for the computer too is custom made and it cannot be used as a general computer as of now. You may not be able to open your spreadsheets on the quantum computer. So you may ask what's the use of such a computer. Well, as said due to the inherent nature of extremely high speeds it can operate at and qubits taking multiple states simultaneously make them extremely faster.
Quantum Bits or Qubits
So now let's talk about what are Qubits and how they work and why is a quantum computer so fast. Well, qubits are the set of atoms entangled with others in the quantum state. It may feel sci-fi to many but that's how simply I can make you understand the qubit. Now all the Quantum computers that are designed are working on extremely low temperatures to keep the cubits stable. One of the most powerful computers by Google called Sycamore is 53 cubit. In October 2019 the Sycamore claimed quantum supremacy by performing the mathematical calculation which could have taken 10,000 years by today's supercomputer. Now you got it why there is a lot of buzz around the Quantum computer. Yet another American company claimed quantum supremacy in July 2020. They have created 128 qubit second-generation quantum computers and some of the researchers and experts believe that these computers are so powerful that it can decrypt the cryptocurrency algorithm itself. Isn't that scary for those of you who are invested in cryptocurrencies.
Almost all of the computers that I mentioned in the topic are using some sort of cubit and to achieve that the scientists have used superconductors to make these machines. Well, Chinese scientists have a different approach and they have used photons instead of superconductors and light is a means to develop their quantum computer. As per the claims by Chinese scientists they have obtained quantum supremacy. And personally, I feel that the approach by Chinese scientists is more superior.
Race to Quantum Supremacy and its Uses
Now, what is actually quantum supremacy? well, the race between companies and countries for having the most powerful Quantum computer is on and who so ever achieves the superiority in that is said to have the quantum supremacy.
As mentioned earlier the Quantum computers are not going to replace your desktops or mobile processors any time soon. But the ability to scale up the cubits and enhance the power of the Quantum computer is what makes it special that it can be scaled up to a very large computational machine. The uses of the Quantum computer as of now are task-specific and problem-specific. But the power of computational and mathematical problems that a Quantum computer can solve is almost ten thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer that the powerful nations of the world have today.
As of now, the Quantum computers are still in their nascent stage the tech is yet to evolve and mature. They are large clunky and require a lot of power and space. But even with this advent of new computer type, things are going to change more rapidly. With such a muscle to perform complex tasks, it can solve real-time problems, it can even predict the outcome of the war and the probability of War. It can decrypt the cryptocurrencies.
There is a lot of exciting future for Quantum computers. Some day it may happen that there could be just one Quantum computer and your Mobile device's brain may be powered from one such Quantum computer else the mobile that you carry will just have no power else to connect to the internet and have a brain of its own from the Almighty Quantum computer that may be sitting centrally providing all that computational power that your device or you may need.
I hope you guys enjoyed that article.
0 Comments