D-Wave announces new quantum computer

D-Wave has launched its third generation of quantum computers, the D-Wave 2X. The computer can use just over 1000 working qubits, double the amount of the previous model. In addition to being faster, the computer should also be quieter.

The company wrote this in a press release on its website. The computer should allow customers to run more complex and larger complex problems on the system. The temperature at which the processor operates is below 15 millikelvin, which is close to absolute zero. In terms of performance, the D-Wave 2X should be up to fifteen times faster than normal PCs, although the New Scientist writes that the comparison is not entirely fair.

D-Wave had the machine solve several randomized optimization problems against a normal computer. The normal computer used for the calculations in this case only one core of an Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor, a chip that has eight cores. The results would have been different if all cores had been used, Matthias Troyer of Zurich University of Technology told New Scientist. In the past, Troyer worked on software to run benchmarks on a normal computer that can still be compared with the D-Wave computers.

The benchmark test was run and if data entry time and the like are not taken into account, the quantum computer would be even 600 times faster than the conventional computer. One of the criticisms of the test is that it was not necessary to find the absolute best answer, but a near-best answer. The D-Wave machine was allowed to do this in 20 microseconds and the conventional computer was then given the same amount of time to find a solution of comparable quality. Troyer thinks that’s a bit of an unfair fight, because it’s like a marathon runner going up against a sprinter, with the marathoner at a disadvantage on the first leg and the sprinter later in the race.

But that may not be so interesting for quantum computing at the moment. It is more interesting to develop hardware and software that can work with the systems. Researchers can now buy online computing time from Google on a quantum system of the search giant.

The paper with the benchmarks can be found here.