| Title | Quantum Computing Set for a Funding Boom? Intel Invests $50 Million | |
| Date | Friday September 04 2015, @03:33PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the better-start-using-a-longer-key-NOW dept. | ||
Quantum computing continues to attract investment, and Intel has just announced a $50 million investment to support research at Delft University of Technology:
Quantum computing is, for many, a given for solving certain kinds of problems, and it is going to take a significant amount of funding to turn the ideas embodied in quantum computing into working machines. That was the consensus of the researchers who spoke recently about quantum computing at the ISC 2015 supercomputing conference in Germany, who had varying opinions about the right approach to building quantum computers and the time it would take to get a machine of sufficient size to solve real problems.
Google has acquired a quantum machine from upstart D-Wave and has been playing around with it to see what kinds of problems – particularly search indexing problems – they might be better at solving than conventional binary machines. D-Wave raised $23.1 million in January from unknown investors, and has received a total of $139 million in funding from a variety of investors, including investment bank Goldman Sachs, In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency), Bezos Expeditions (the investment arm of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos), as well as BDC Capital, Harris & Harris Group, and DFJ.
[...] Another hotbed of quantum computing is QuTech, which is located at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where Liven Vandersypen heads up research efforts. Vandersypen was blunt about the steep curve quantum computing has to climb to go from curiosity to useful tool. "What we are after, in the end, is a machine with many millions of qubits – say 100 million qubits – and where we are now with this circuit model, where we really need to control, very precisely and accurately, every qubit by itself with its mess of quantum entangled states, is at the level of 5 to 10 quantum bits," Vandersypen explained. "So it is still very far way."
But it just got a little bit closer, because binary chip juggernaut Intel has just ponied up $50 million to support research at Delft University of Technology over the next ten years. This may seem like a strange thing for Intel to do, but as we pointed out back in July, a quantum computer will not stand in isolation, but will require a very large and very conventional parallel supercomputer to do error detection and correction on the qubits. And Intel, as a key player in computing, has to hedge its bets outside of traditional logic devices.
Under the collaboration agreement, Intel will put engineers to work on quantum computing at QuTech and at its own facilities to coordinate with Vandersypen and his team. Intel is specifically going to help with its manufacturing, electronics, and architectural expertise as QuTech tries to take the collection of electronics gear – which includes waveform generators, cryo-amplifiers, FPGAs, and other gear to control and measure qubits – and reduce them down in size. This will take semiconductor manufacturing and packaging expertise, which Intel can supply. To highlight the investment, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich put out a statement outlining his views on quantum computing, pointing out that the future of computing is not easy to see, even if you have some good stars to steer by.
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