In the world of computer science, the faster and smart computer one tech company has, it will be the winner in the AI and IoT race. Currently, China has made headlines with its remarkable innovations and breakthrough’s in CPU processing power. Recently China demonstrated the Jiuzhang computer with 56 qubit processing power which is reportedly a few orders of magnitude faster than Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore computer.
However, the versatility side is still dominated by U.S. scientists. Jiuzhang was developed in 2020 by China to be the fastest optical circuit supercomputer for a specific set of calculations. For that reason, the computer could not be programmed to perform varied tasks, but the Sycamore is overall more practical.
Both of these models can achieve “quantum supremacy”, and proved that they are much faster than regular supercomputers which need years to calculate what quantum computers can solve in a few hours. But still, the Chinese researchers at the University of Science and Technology in Shanghai have been consistently working on further improving Jiuzhang. The researchers recently announced that they have successfully tested a more versatile version dubbed Zuchongzhi with 66 qubit processing power.
This new and improved Zuchongzhi computer integrates 11 rows and 6 columns of qubits to form a two-dimensional rectangular lattice pattern. But the scientists researching have only been able to utilize 56 qubits to perform various tasks, and it only took 1.2 hours for the new chip to calculate a random quantum circuit. The same task takes several hours for the Google Sycamore and takes up to 8 years for conventional supercomputers.
