In light of the recent news that John Martinis is joining Google, it is worthwhile to check out this Google talk from last year:

It is an hour long talk but very informative. John Martinis does an excellent job at explaining, in very simple terms, how hardware-based surface code error correction works.

Throughout the talk he uses the Gate model formalism.  Hence it is quite natural to assume that this is what the Google chip will aim for. This is certainly reinforced by the fact that other publications, such as from the IEEE, have also drawn a stark contrast between the Martinis approach, and D-Wave’s quantum annealing architecture. This is certainly how I interpreted the news as well.

But on second thought, and careful parsing of the press releases, the case is not as clear cut. For instance, Technology Review quotes Martinis in this fashion:

“We would like to rethink the design and make the qubits in a different way,” says Martinis of his effort to improve on D-Wave’s hardware. “We think there’s an opportunity in the way we build our qubits to improve the machine.”

This sounds more like Martinis wants to build a quantum annealing chip based on his logical, error corrected qubits.  From an engineering stand-point this would make sense, as this should be easier to achieve than a fully universal gate-based architecture, and it will address the key complaint that I heard from developers programming the D-Wave chip i.e. that they really would like to see error correction implemented on the chip.

On the other hand, in light of Martinis presentation, I presume that he will regard such an architecture simply as another stepping stone towards universal quantum computation.