BBC News
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
IBM has unveiled an advanced “quantum” processor that is part of an effort to build super-fast computers.
These machines could revolutionise computing, harnessing the strange world of quantum physics to solve problems beyond reach for even the most advanced “classical” ones.
But the hurdles in building practical, large-scale versions have kept quantum computers confined to the lab.
The new chip has 127 “qubits”, twice as many as the previous IBM processor.
Qubits (quantum bits) are the most basic units of information in a quantum computer.