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.

There isn't yet a roadmap to show Microsoft can scale its chip to the million topological qubits required to make a working quantum computer.

There's a type of particle called a Majorana fermion that was hypothesized in 1937. This particle has some unique properties, and it's long been theorized that Majorana particles could prove useful for quantum computing.