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D-Wave's 2,000-Qubit Quantum Annealing Computer Now 1,000x Faster Than Previous Generation (tomshardware.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: D-Wave, a Canadian company developing the first commercial "quantum computer," announced its next-generation quantum annealing computer with 2,000 qubits, which is twice as many as its previous generation had. One highly exciting aspect of quantum computers of all types is that beyond the seemingly Moore's Law-like increase in number of qubits every two years, their performance increases much more than just 2x, unlike with regular microprocessors. This is because qubits can hold a value of 0, 1, or a superposition of the two, making quantum systems able to deal with much more complex information. If D-Wave's 2,000-qubit computer is now 1,000 faster than the previous 1,000-qubit generation (D-Wave 2X), that would mean that, for the things Google tested last year, it should now be 100 billion times faster than a single-core CPU. The new generation also comes with control features, which allows users to modify how D-Wave's quantum system works to better optimize their solutions. These control features include the following capabilities: The ability to tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits to enhance application performance; The ability to sample the state of the quantum computer during the quantum annealing process to power hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms that were not previously possible; The ability to combine quantum processing with classical processing to improve the quality of both optimization and sampling results returned from the system. D-Wave's CEO, Vern Brownell, also said that D-Wave's quantum computers could also be used for machine learning task in ways that wouldn't be possible on classical computers. The company is also training the first generation of programmers to develop applications for D-Wave quantum systems. Last year, Google said that D-Wave's 1,000 qubit computer proved to be 100 million times faster than a classical computer with a single core: "We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1,000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core," said Hartmut Neven, Google's Director of Engineering.
Annealing is an optimization algorithm, mainly. It can be applied to other things, but generally it is really good at optimizing complex problems with lots of variables. Used extensively in simulation packages for pretty much everything, and other problems without easy closed form solutions. Good for the traveling salesman problem also.
What can you actually do with this?
Simulated annealing, which is used to solve a huge number of optimization problems. It is very compute intensive, and is often run on GPUs. If the claimed speed up is real, that would be a really big deal.
I (and I suspect many others) have a decent idea of the *concept* of quantum computers, but understanding actual application is... elusive.
Just FYI, D-Wave is not a general-purpose quantum computer. It's a specialized device for solving one very specific class of problems; gaining insight into it probably won't help you understand the full capabilities of quantum computers.
I can't explain quantum computers to you in general, because I don't understand them either. I do know one very important application though: using Shor's factorization algorithm to break RSA encryption. You'll hear about it when real quantum computers reach commercial maturity, because a bunch of Slashdot articles will appear about how everyone is in a panic to rush and replace RSA with something else. :-)