Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Microsoft says it has developed a breakthrough quantum processor based on a new state of matter, giving it a clear path to achieve quantum computing’s long-term promise of solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.

Majorana 1 is the first quantum processor with a topological core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.

Microsoft has introduced Majorana 1, a chip for quantum computing, which it said will enable computers to solve incredibly difficult industrial-scale problems in mere years instead of the decades current machines need.

At the core of a quantum computer are qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Goo