GOOGLE says it has developed a quantum computer billions of times faster than any other technology.

The US giant claims it took 200 seconds to carry out a task that would have taken a supercomputer around 10,000 years.

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Experts called it a "phenomenally significant" breakthrough.

In conventional computers, a unit of information or bit can have a value of 0 or 1.

But quantum bits can be both 0 and 1, allowing multiple computations at once.

University College London expert Dr Ciarn Gilligan-Lee said: It is the first baby step on a long journey where we can fully harness the power of quantum mechanics that will eclipse anything our current laptops or even supercomputers can do.

"It is a huge technological and scientific milestone."

Quantum computing promises to revolutionise the way PCs crunch data.

They could perform important work like designing super-materials, speeding up package deliveries and creating new drugs for deadly diseases at high speed.

Scientists have spent decades trying to achieve "quantum supremacy", a landmark that Google now claims to have conquered.

The phrase basically means the moment at which aquantum computer is able to do something that a classical computer can't.

The search giant worked for more than a decade to produce its own quantum computing chip, called Sycamore.

"Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds," Google researchers saidin a blog post about the work.

"From measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output."

Google carried out its research at a lab in Santa Barbara, California.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

Dr Luke Fleet, a senior editor at Nature, said quantum machines are still years, if not decades away.

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He said: This breakthrough result marks the dawn of a new type of computing.it allows you to compute things faster not just a little, but lot faster!

This is transformative as people will be able to compute things that they previously thought impossible.

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Google claims to have developed a quantum computer which is BILLIONS of times faster than our most advanced - The Sun