Thought Leadership
Amazon unveiled its first processor for quantum computing on Thursday. According to the company, the chip developed under the name “Ocelot” is intended to help develop highly efficient quantum systems. The announcement comes just a week after Microsoft unveiled its own quantum chip.
“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer with transformative societal impact would require only about a tenth of the resources of traditional approaches,” explained Fernando Brandão, Director of Applied Science at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oskar Painter, Head of Quantum Hardware, in a blog post. This could significantly shorten the path to practically usable quantum computers.
However, the current Ocelot chip only has nine qubits – significantly less than Google’s “Willow” chip with 105 qubits, which is currently considered the most powerful quantum chip.
Error correction as a key challenge
Like Microsoft with its Majorana 1 chip, Amazon developed its chip internally. One focus was on error correction – one of the main problems in quantum computing. According to Painter, public interest in quantum technology has increased recently as companies have introduced new methods for developing error-resistant qubits.
Amazon’s approach is described in detail in a new publication in the journal Nature. According to Amazon, the Ocelot chip is the first quantum chip to implement “bosonic quantum error correction”. This technology uses special particles that can protect quantum information from errors. Since bosons can exist in a wider range of states, error correction becomes much more efficient.
The type of qubit used by Amazon is called a “cat qubit” – a reference to the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, in which a cat can be alive and dead at the same time. This technology is expected to reduce the cost of quantum error correction by up to 90 percent, which is a crucial step towards unlocking the full potential of quantum computers in the long term.
Time frame for commercial use
Painter expects it to take at least ten years for commercially viable quantum computers. Other industry experts such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are even more cautious and predict 15 to 30 years. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also expects at least a decade.
