Amazon has unveiled a prototype quantum chip called Ocelot. The first-generation processor has what is being called “rudimentary computing capability” but is progress on a path toward a more sophisticated machine. Ocelot represents what the company says is its “effort to develop, from the ground up, a hardware implementation of quantum error correction that is both resource efficient and scalable” with an aim of reducing error correction by up to 90 percent. Developed at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, Ocelot can be manufactured using microelectronics techniques, Amazon says.

VentureBeat repeats Amazon’s claims that Ocelot is the first quantum chip to deliver “a scalable architecture for bosonic error correction, surpassing traditional qubit approaches,” adding that it is also “the first implementation of a noise-biased gate — a key to unlocking hardware-efficient error correction necessary to build scalable, commercially viable quantum computers.”

A blog post by AWS Director of Quantum Applications Fernando Brandão and Head of Quantum Hardware Oskar Painter cites as another technical breakthrough Ocelot’s speedy performance for superconducting qubits, “with bit-flip times approaching one second in tandem with phase-flip times of 20 microseconds.”

“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would require as little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing,” suggest Painter and Brandão.

In a news post, Amazon says Ocelot’s novel architecture tackles error correction “from the ground up and using the ‘cat qubit.’” Named after the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment,” such qubits “intrinsically suppress certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction.”

With the potential for otherworldly speed, Quantum computers hold the promise of solving problems that are beyond the scope of classical computers, but they are notoriously unstable. While a basic level of quantum compute requires sophisticated algorithms with billions of quantum gates, “extreme sensitivity to environmental noise means that the best quantum hardware today can run only about a thousand gates without error,” making error correction a major hurdle, explains VentureBeat.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google “are all trying to solve the challenge of quantum error correction, though Google’s work in developing superconducting quantum circuits is most similar to Amazon’s, according to Painter,” writes The Wall Street Journal of Google’s new chip, dubbed Willow.

Amazon formally published the results of its lastest quantum work in Nature.