computer
The computer and AI giant is launching a machine with “Heron” chips that uses subatomic particles instead of ones and zeros
Computing and artificial intelligence technology giant IBM on Monday unveiled a new quantum computing chip and machine that the company said could serve as building blocks for much larger and faster systems than traditional silicon-based computers.
The launch of IBM’s so-called Quantum System Two, which uses three cryogenically cooled “Heron” chips, comes at a time when technology rivals such as Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, China’s Baidu and others are vying to develop machines that use quantum bits – subatomic particles different from those or zeros of traditional computing can be a “superposition” of one and zero at the same time.
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IBM says it has developed a new way to connect chips within machines and then connect machines together that, combined with new error-correcting code, could produce quantum machines by 2033. The company plans to use the new chip in its enterprise AI platform, watsonx.
“We are firmly in the era where quantum computing will be used as a tool to explore new frontiers of science,” IBM research director Dario Gil said in a statement.
Quantum computing, Gil told CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday, could make it possible to solve problems in physics, chemistry, engineering and medicine in minutes that would take today’s supercomputers millions of years to complete – if at all.
“The beauty of this,” he said, “is that not even a million or a billion of these interconnected supercomputers could do the calculations of these future machines.”
IBM said it has installed one of the new machines at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where research leader Serpil Erzurum said the technology could one day be used to study the behavior of proteins and the shapes they take depending on their function model.
“I need to understand the form it’s in when it’s performing an interaction or a function that I’m not supposed to be performing for that patient,” Erzurum says. “Cancer, autoimmunity – that’s a problem. We are completely limited by the computational ability to look at the structure of any single molecule, even just one, in real time.”
Portal contributed to this report
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