17-qubit Intel chip

Jim Clarke, Intel's director of quantum hardware, holds the 17-qubit chip. © Intel.

Intel announced that it was making a 17-qubit chip available to its research partners. According to Jim Clarke, director for quantum hardware at Intel, the company settled on 17 qubits because it’s the minimum required for error correction. The qubit supraconductors operate at 20 millikelvins (a brisk -273° Celsius). Intel is touting its bolstered protection against interference, the bane of nano-scale computing. In terms of development speed, Intel’s supraconductor qubit project is clearly miles ahead of those based on other types of qubits, but the competition is hard at it (IBM, Google, Microsoft…) and we can expect several announcements over the next few months. To find out more, read our recent article: “Microsoft’s quantum gamble”.

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, “Intel accelerates its quantum computing efforts with 17-qubit chip.”