New Chinese optical quantum chip allegedly 1,000x faster than Nvidia GPUs

Quantum computing is still a long way from becoming a mainstream part of society; however, a Chinese firm has developed an all-new optical quantum computing chip that is closing the gap, called the world's first scalable, "industrial-grade" quantum chip. The South China Morning Post reports that the chip's developer claims it is "1,000 times faster" than Nvidia's GPUs at AI tasks and is already being used in some industries, including aerospace and finance.

The chip in question was built by the Chip Hub for Integrated Photonics Xplore (CHIPX) and is based on a brand-new co-packaging technology for photons and electronics, and it claims to be the first quantum computing platform to be widely deployable. These photonic chips house more than 1,000 optical components on a small 6-inch silicon wafer using a monolithic design, making them incredibly compact compared to traditional quantum computers.

All of these factors have reportedly allowed systems with these quantum chips to be deployed in just two weeks, compared to six months for traditional quantum computers. Its design also allows these chips to work in tandem with each other, just like AI GPUs, with deployments allegedly being "easily" scaled up to support 1 million qubits of quantum processing power.

CHIPX's optical quantum chip uses light (or photons) as the information carriers for qubits, rather than matter-based materials. Light has many advantages over raw electricity for computer processing: it takes up no physical space, generates no heat, and travels more efficiently and faster than electricity. Optical computing is attracting more and more scientists and companies as a potential replacement for electrical connections, especially now that power consumption in data centers is sky-high thanks to AI.

However, the current Achilles heel of China's new quantum chip has been the difficulty in producing these chips in large numbers, due to the delicacy of the materials used. The facilities responsible for producing these chips are reportedly producing 12,000 wafers per year, with each wafer yielding "about" 350 chips. That's a relatively low production volume compared to typical semiconductor fabs.

There are still many unknowns about this new quantum chip; we don't know which kinks need to be worked out (beyond the production issues) to make these chips truly mainstream. But, regardless, China is intent upon beating Western countries in quantum computing capabilities. If the "1,000x faster than Nvidia GPUs" statement is to be believed, it would be a marvelous feat but unsurprising in the world of quantum computers, which, by nature, can solve equations at a rate impossible to comprehend compared to classical computers.

We haven't seen quantum computers this small or as scalable from Western companies, but with companies like Nvidia pouring serious cash into the quantum computing sector, perhaps that will come soon.

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