It consists of six proficient quantum bits, or “qubits” that produce a specific volume, making it one of the highest performing quantum computing system about to arrive on the supercomputer scene.
Tony Uttley, head of the quantum at Honeywell and Division President of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, told ZDNet the following:
In March we said within the next three months we’re going to be releasing the world’s highest-performing quantum computer, and so this is a case of Honeywell where it did what it said it was going to do.
JP Morgan Chase, an investment banking company, along with other high-end customers, already have early access to the machine. They’re putting it to good use with various early applications at their disposal, some of which is a complicated measure to operate on an ordinary electron-based computer.
“Multiple hours of access,” is what JP Morgan Chase has got as of now. Their reaction? “Ecstatic,” as informed by Tony Uttle. While the company hasn’t got into much detail about the exact nature of the applications offered by the promising quantum machine, they have specified it something “near and dear to financial services.” This does involve detection of fraud, however, and trading program strategies using Artificial Intelligence or, in other words, AI.
Shedding some light on JP Morgan Chase’s work with the quantum computer, Uttley said,
What they’ve done are basically some test circuits. Circuits that they were not able to run on anybody else’s computer, or at least not run without getting just a noise answer, they were able to successfully run on ours and have the correct results.”
Tony Uttley refrained purposely from naming other clients of their latest innovation. Still, three categories are being put under test by these clients- optimization, machine learning, and chemistry, and materials science. To explain, he says,
“They’re basically carving out as little as 1% to 5% of an algorithm and tacking that to the quantum computer to get a very specific result that gets then fed back into a classical machine,” he explained.
A benchmark created by IBM acts as the base for Honeywell’s most recent claim of having developed the best quantum computer ever. This benchmark, according to Andrew W. Cross and peers at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, is “the largest random circuit of equal width and depth that the computer successfully implements.”
The standard of measurement that IBM itself chose is “quantum volume.” This is best defined by Cross and his peers as “the performance parameters (coherence, calibration errors, crosstalk, spectator errors, gate fidelity, measurement fidelity, initialization fidelity) as well as the design parameters such as connectivity and gate set.”
Mostly, the number of functional qubits in an operating system is quite lesser than the actual or raw qubits. This is because some of those qubits lose themselves in correcting the error. Despite this, Tony Uttley has confidently stated that Honeywell’s quantum beast does not entertain this loss of functional cubits mainly because of its premium, and top-notch design.
We are now at quantum volume of 64, which means we have six effective qubits, and unlike our competitors, it only took six qubits to get to six effective cubits, and that is because we are not limited by either the connectivity of our system, because our qubits are all fully connected, nor are we limited by our fidelity, which you can of think about as how accurate the system is.”, Uttley explained following the claim.
To talk about the physical build of the computer, it’s reported to pack a stainless steel, ultra-high vacuum chamber with a size almost the same as a basketball. Additionally, some holes make way for laser. It is cooled by liquid helium, a cryogenic refrigerant, at a temperature bit above absolute zero, which is equivalent to -273.15 degrees on the Celsius scale.
The company had made yet another promise, despite the one they just fulfilled, that the amount of quantum volume would increase by five every year for the next five years. They are confident that these milestones are theirs for achieving.