Following Google and Microsoft, Amazon's cloud division is also unveiling its own quantum chip, Ocelot. It shows Amazon Web Services' pioneering efforts to develop a hardware implementation of quantum error correction from scratch, Bloomberg reports.
One of the key features of Ocelot is Amazon's approach to error correction. Conventional computers use bits represented in the states of 1 or 0 to store information, but quantum computers use qubits, which can be in two states at once. This is a key advantage of such computers, as they can solve problems hundreds of times faster than even the most powerful supercomputers.
The biggest challenge with quantum chips is fixing the errors that occur when trying to get quantum particles into a usable state. These errors are caused by external factors like heat, vibration, or electromagnetic interference. To address this, Amazon introduced cat qubit technology, named after Schrödinger's cat experiment, which suggests that an animal can be both alive and dead at the same time.
Under Amazon's process, each Ocelot chip contains five qubits that store data, circuitry to stabilize it, and four additional qubits to detect errors in the data qubits. This architecture could reduce the cost of building a quantum computer by 90%, as other processes would require a much larger number of physical qubits to resolve errors.
Earlier, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, which also introduced its Willow quantum chip, said that the first commercial practical quantum computers could appear in 5-10 years. However, the emergence of such technologies can also bring dangers, in particular, quantum computing can make it much easier to crack cryptocurrency encryption.