Communications of the ACM

Intel just took a significant step toward making quantum computing more practical. The company and QuTech say they've demonstrated the first instance of high-fidelity two-qubit control using its Horse Ridge cryogenic control processor. Quantum computers normally run into an interconnect bottleneck by using room-temperature electronics to steer a refrigerated quantum chip — the demo showed that Horse Ridge could achieve the same fidelity (99.99 percent) as those 'hotter' electronics.

The two firms also showed that Horse Ridge could control multiple qubits on a single radio frequency line, also known as frequency multiplexing, by using an algorithm (Deutsch-Jonza) that's much more efficient on quantum computers than conventional machines.