Xanadu just launched borealis, 216 qumodes photonic quantum computer, this week. https://xanadu.ai/blog/beating-classical-computers-with-Borealis Its number of qubits is very interesting because it has twice the number of qubits of IBM Quantum device, but i'm not sure about if it make sense to compare the number of qubits between these two systems.
$\begingroup$
$\endgroup$
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
$\begingroup$
$\endgroup$
My name is Isaac and I work at Xanadu.
That’s a really good question! Generally speaking, you can argue that 216 qumodes are more powerful than 216 superconducting (SC) qubits since qumodes encode infinite-dimensional information (continuous variables) compared to qubits (two-dimensional). There are more subtleties to this question, but your question is quite general.
As it relates to, say, Google’s SC qubit paper, they tackled an entirely different mathematical problem than Borealis to show a quantum computational advantage. In that sense, there isn’t common ground to draw equivalencies between either device since the experiments themselves were designed to demonstrate quantum computational advantage in different settings.
