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The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.

The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power.

So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers.

But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.

As we advance as a species, there are a lot of things that once seemed impossible a century ago that are now a reality. It’s called evolving. For example, there was a time when most people believed the earth was flat. Then Eratosthenes came onto the scene and proved that the world is round.

At the time, it was groundbreaking. But today, quantum mechanics rules the roost. This school of physics deals with the physical realm on the scale of atoms and electrons; thus making many of the equations in classical mechanics useless. With that being said, let’s take a look at three of the most amazing quantum breakthroughs that are bringing liberation and freedom to the world of science today!

We kick things off with a team of Chinese scientists claiming to have constructed a quantum computer that has the ability to perform certain computations almost 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most advanced supercomputer

The breakthrough sheds light on quantum computational advantage—which is also famously known as quantum supremacy.But it’s become a hotly-contested tech race between Chinese researchers and some of the largest US tech corporations such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

For example, Google announced in 2019 that it had constructed the first quantum computer that was able to perform a computation in under 200 seconds.

Another major quantum breakthrough is from Denmark; specifically from the University of Copenhagen.

The major advantage of light-based quantum computers is that the technology is already put in place for enhancements to be made. This includes increasing the number of qubits available to advance photonic chips that are used in the telecom industry.

And lastly, we move to none other than IBM. According to a groundbreaking study published in Physical Review Research, a group of University of Chicago Scientists has announced that they were able to turn IBM’s largest quantum computer into a quantum material itself.

They programmed the computer in such a manner that it was able to turn into a type of quantum material known as an exciton condensate; whose existence has only recently been proved. Such condensates have been identified for their potential in future technology; mainly because they conduct energy with almost zero loss.

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