IBM has announced plans to build its own quantum computer that is 20,000 times more powerful than existing quantum computers. The IBM Quantum Starling computer is expected to be ready by 2029 and will also require a quindecillion (1048) more memory than existing supercomputers.
When operational, it will be the world's first large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer that will set the stage for practical and scalable quantum computing. Quantum Starling will be located at the IBM Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, USA.
IBM aims for the Quantum Starling to be able to perform 100 million quantum operations using 200 logical qubits. If this is achieved, IBM will build the Quantum Blue Jay with the capacity of 1 billion quantum operations using 200 logical qubits.
Quantum computers are developed to solve mathematical problems that were previously said to be unsolvable. Last year Google announced that their Willow quantum chip could solve a problem that would have taken the world's second-fastest supercomputer Frontier 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) years in less than 5 minutes. 10 septillion years is older than the age of the universe.
Quantum computers differ from regular computers in that they do not store data in binary form. Instead, they use the basic unit of a qubit, which can have two binary values (0, 1). Two qubits give four values (00, 01, 10, 11) while three qubits have eight values (000, 001, 010, 100, 011, 110, 101, 111). This exponential increase allows them to perform many more calculations simultaneously than conventional computers.