Google's new quantum processor could soon outperform classic supercomputers With the quantum computing race heating up between Google, IBM and Intel, it feels like we're hurtling towards quantum supremacy, that milestone when a quantum computer outperforms a classical one for the first time. Bringing us ever closer, Google has now unveiled Bristlecone, a new quantum computer chip with the record-setting power of 72 quantum bits (qubits). Traditional computers perform their calculations in binary, so every bit of data is represented as either a zero or a one. Thanks to the quirky science that is quantum mechanics, a qubit can be in a superposition of both, effectively representing both a zero and a one at the same time. That means the power of a quantum computing system scales exponentially – two qubits can represent four states at once (00, 01, 10 and 11), three qubits represent eight, and so on. As a result, quantum computers are grea...