D-Wave 2,000 qubit quantum computer next year?

D-Wave Systems has released some more details about its proposed 2,000qubit quantum computer, at the company’s inaugural users group conference in New Mexico.

The processor, intended to available next year, has doubles the number of qubits over the previous generation D-Wave 2X system, which was available for shipping in August last year.

“The new system also introduces control features that allow users to tune the quantum computational process to solve problems faster and find more diverse solutions when they exist. In early tests these new features have yielded performance improvements of up to 1000 times over the D-Wave 2X system,” claimed the firm.

The D-Wave 2X is said to have over 128,000 Josephson tunnel junctions and operate at 15mK.

“D-Wave’s quantum system runs a quantum annealing algorithm to find the lowest points in a virtual energy landscape representing a computational problem to be solved,” said D-Wave. “The lowest points in the landscape correspond to optimal or near-optimal solutions to the problem.”

The new control features are there to find lowest points more efficiently, and include:

tuning the rate of annealing of individual qubits
combining quantum processing with classical processing
state sampling during the quantum annealing “to power hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms that were not possible before”

D-Wave’s user conference has speakers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Electronics Weekly would like to hear from experts who can put D-Wave’s achievements in perspective.