Information / Electronics & Computing

First Quantum Processors

Superconducting chips with dozens to over a thousand qubits are built; Google’s Sycamore (2019) is the first claimed “quantum supremacy”.

In 2019 Google had its 53-qubit chip Sycamore run a random circuit in 200 seconds that classical computers supposedly needed 10,000 years for (later heavily qualified by better classical algorithms). IBM raised its qubit count from 127 (2021) to 1,121 (2023), and trapped ions and neutral atoms joined as competitors. The chips were noisy (typically 0.1-1% errors per operation) and too error-prone for useful work.