Just a few months after providing 17-bit test chips, Intel is back in the spotlight and announces at CES 2018 that new 49-bit Tangle Lake chips will be ready.
The race for the integration of qubits into chips that will someday be used for quantum computers is in full swing and the Intel group is taking a close interest in this new field.
Last October, it announced the first shipments of test chips capable of handling 17 qubits while maintaining a compact format. For CES 2018 in Las Vegas, the Santa Clara group has unveiled a new test chip that will support 49 qubits this time.
It is named Tangle Lake, named after a chain of lakes in Alaska that recalls both the extreme cold temperatures necessary for qubit operation and their entanglement state.
The path is however still long before a complete quantum computer system capable of solving engineering problems. To achieve this, it will take another 5 to 7 years of work and systems managing at least 1 million qubits, says Mike Mayberra, vice president at Intel Labs.
Hence the need to work on alternatives such as spin qubits, for which the role of the transistor is played by a single electron, and which should make it possible to group more easily and quickly a large number of qubits than the technology of superconducting qubits such as those of the Tangle Lake chip.
Intel also conducts research in this sense to the extent that the process of production processors with spin qubits is similar to that of standard silicon chips.
With the announcement of Tangle Lake at 49 qubits, it is also to answer that of the IBM group which announced a prototype of processor to 50 qubits last November