Yes you read that correctly.
With all the fanfare towards Google, IBM, and the Chinese, the global leader appears to be Honeywell. Not exactly known for its expertise in computing, the industrial giant claims to have a breakthrough that will set it ahead of the rest of the pack over the next decade.
The company achieved this by applying a different technology compared to what Google and IBM are doing. Instead of using qubits, Honeywell used ion traps. The qubit chips are faster but the ion trap holds the quantum state longer while being more accurate.
This is an enormous breakthrough.
Honeywell is achieving twice the power that IBM is able to attain.
The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.
So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.
A couple points are interesting about this.
The first is that, less than a year after Google claimed to achieve quantum supremacy, they are eclipsed. While this is not a total surprise, the by whom is the baffling aspect to it. Who would have guessed that it was going to be Honeywell to jump into the lead. In fact, who knew they were even involved in this. It just shows that, in the world today, competition can come from anywhere.
Another aspect to all this is the fact that these breakthroughs are going to lay the foundation for advanced (far advanced) computing in the future. As exciting as this all is, there is nothing that is going to be available to the general public any time soon. It is at least a decade before we see quantum computers that are stable enough along with software applications that will make them useful.
Quantum computers offer great promise. Experts believe that the computation power will enable us to address questions that cannot be handled by classical computers. The downside, according to many, is that a quantum computer will be able to break the world's best encryption in a matter of seconds. This has the cybersecurity community on alert.
Like most technologies, there is the potential for both good and bad. In this case, since it is going to take a while before we see practical applications, the world has time to prepare.
Of course, the news from Honeywell came out of left field so who knows what else will arise over the next couple of years.
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