Speaker 1: I love my computer. You make me feel all right
Speaker 1: every waking ore and every lonely night. Intel's working every
Speaker 1: we're waking out and every waking night to make computers different.
Speaker 1: And some of the advances happening right now are going
Speaker 1: to show up computers a few years from now and
Speaker 1: they're just mind blowing. Jim Clark joins U right now
Speaker 1: as the director of Quantum Hardware. Yes, Quantum Hardware and
Speaker 1: Intel Um and Jim, let's let's just start your your
Speaker 1: base up their in Portland, Oregon, or in probably in Hillsboro, Oregon,
Speaker 1: or intels some massive fabs, the most impressive and ever
Speaker 1: built in the history of time. But what you guys
Speaker 1: are working on going forward is so interesting. Describing what
Speaker 1: quantum hardware is Okay, thanks for having me on the show. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll start with a coin. Let's take a quarter for example.
Speaker 1: If you hold the quarter in your hand, that can
Speaker 1: either be heads or tails. It's one or the other.
Speaker 1: If you think of a transistor like we build here
Speaker 1: in Oregon, it's either on or off. It's a switch
Speaker 1: that's one or the other. Zeros and one for a moment, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for a moment. I want you to think of that
Speaker 1: coin is spinning. Imagine you're flipping it up into the air,
Speaker 1: and I'll ask you whether that's heads or tails while
Speaker 1: it's spinning. The answer is that it's both, perhaps both
Speaker 1: at the same time. That's what a quantum bit of
Speaker 1: information is, two states at the same time. Now, if
Speaker 1: you bring two of these cubits together, you can form
Speaker 1: four states at the same time. If you brought three,
Speaker 1: it would be eight states. So it's exponential in its
Speaker 1: compute power. It would only take fifty of these cubits
Speaker 1: entangled together, if you will, to produce a register file
Speaker 1: that's larger than any supercomputer on Earth can generate. So
Speaker 1: is this so is this essentially squaring the how many
Speaker 1: times you can You know, you instead of having two
Speaker 1: processes happen at the same time, you can happen sort
Speaker 1: of four combinations of a process process happen at a
Speaker 1: single time, and then you have sixteen of a certain
Speaker 1: process happening at the same time. Uh, that's that's pretty close.
Speaker 1: Every time you add another cubit or another bit of information,
Speaker 1: you essentially double the compute power of the system. So
Speaker 1: you can see that it gets powerful very quickly. So
Speaker 1: I gotta ask you where does this fit into when
Speaker 1: we talk about things like artificial intelligence and we talk
Speaker 1: about deep learning, UM, tell me how this fits into that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first applications for quantum computing will be as
Speaker 1: accelerators in the data center. Uh, they will be used
Speaker 1: for things like material modeling or chemistry. At the extreme,
Speaker 1: they could be used for things like cryptography and security,
Speaker 1: um things like artificial intelligence and machine learning. There is
Speaker 1: a lot of potential for quantum computing UM to be
Speaker 1: to be pretty influential in this space. But these are
Speaker 1: active research areas. This is essentially at the scientific stage
Speaker 1: at the moment. So where are you guys in this
Speaker 1: research process because you're working on it and you I
Speaker 1: think you put it. You put out a new chip
Speaker 1: or another test chip last month. That's right, that's our
Speaker 1: seventeen cubit chip. Intel has only been in this space
Speaker 1: for a couple of years, but in that time we've
Speaker 1: essentially caught up to the lead pack and what amounts
Speaker 1: to maya one of a marathon. So this is just
Speaker 1: the first step, and our goal is to get these
Speaker 1: um small chips working together, all of the individual cubits
Speaker 1: working together to build this powerful system that I just described.
Speaker 1: So is how is this different? Here's what I can't
Speaker 1: get my head around, and it's it's my own problem, right,
Speaker 1: But but is I don't understand how this is different
Speaker 1: than having lots of transistors working quickly. You know, if
Speaker 1: you get a seventeen cubit system, then that would be
Speaker 1: like a hundred and thirty thousand processes happened instantaneously. Is
Speaker 1: that right? Yeah, so two to the seventeen it's not
Speaker 1: that impressive of a number. But then I would ask
Speaker 1: you to plug in two to the fifty. That's a
Speaker 1: number that we can't simulate today. Um, I would ask
Speaker 1: you to plug in two to the three hundred. Two
Speaker 1: to the three hundred is the same number of states
Speaker 1: as there are atoms in the universe. But but here's
Speaker 1: an understand how is it? Is it just about being
Speaker 1: quicker or there's a kind of process. It's possible when
Speaker 1: you're sort of multidimensional instead of binary ones and zeros
Speaker 1: on and off two heads of the quarter. Great question.
Speaker 1: We talked about power that naturally we think about speed.
Speaker 1: It's less about speed and more the parallelization. Imagine if
Speaker 1: I have a huge string of numbers two to the
Speaker 1: fifty and I have to sequentially go through each one
Speaker 1: to find perhaps the number I'm looking for. But imagine
Speaker 1: if instead, all of these states are coupled together, so
Speaker 1: essentially I can search all two to the fifty of
Speaker 1: them at the same time. That's where the power of
Speaker 1: quantum computing comes from. All right, So I'm thinking some
Speaker 1: of our listeners are pulling over saying, what the heck
Speaker 1: is he talking about? Um? I mean, just tell me
Speaker 1: the practical use of this um and where it needs
Speaker 1: to get to what level, Because from what I understand
Speaker 1: is you've got to have processors need to be much
Speaker 1: larger than the fifty cubits to be capable of useful work.
Speaker 1: So it has a long way to go. Correct, it
Speaker 1: has a long way to go. Um quantum mechanics play
Speaker 1: some tricks on us. These quantum states. They don't stick
Speaker 1: around for very long. It's what we call decoherence. Uh,
Speaker 1: these are very fragile, so we're going to need to
Speaker 1: probably string millions of them, if not more, together to
Speaker 1: do something realistic. That's why we're just such a at
Speaker 1: such an early stage of the race. But once we
Speaker 1: have these chips, they should be able to do calculations
Speaker 1: that a conventional computer would take billions of years to
Speaker 1: do because of the exponential scaleing. Jim just got about
Speaker 1: thirty seconds. So is this something that could be potentially
Speaker 1: much more advanced? We're talking awful lot about IBM Watson.
Speaker 1: Is this something that would be much more advanced? And
Speaker 1: just got about twenty five seconds. Yeah, it's a different
Speaker 1: type of computer. For certain calculations, UM calculations that benefit
Speaker 1: from parallelization, matrix multiplication, etcetera quantum computer would outperform something
Speaker 1: like Watson, But for certain UH, for certain types of
Speaker 1: i'll say more neuromorphic um or artificial intelligence applications, I
Speaker 1: would still expect specialized chip to be quite useful. Wild stuff.
Speaker 1: Jim Clark. Jim Clark a good name of technology always,
Speaker 1: especially now. UH is the director of Quantum Hardware and Intel.
Speaker 1: The good Look of the Future, doesn't a Bloomber Markets
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