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D-Wave Previews Quantum Computing Platform With Over 5,000 Qubits (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the pushing-the-limits dept.

An anonymous reader writes: D-Wave Systems, one of the handful firms that is building a quantum computer, today unveiled the roadmap for its 5,000-qubit quantum computer. Components of D-Wave's next-generation quantum computing platform will come to market between now and mid-2020 via ongoing quantum processing unit (QPU) and cloud-delivered software updates. The complete system will be available through cloud access and for on-premise installation in mid-2020.

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Expand all othello games then by jouassou · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As far as I know, D-Wave doesn't make any universal quantum computers, but only quantum annealers. That means that they can solve some optimization problems on their machine, but they can't actually run e.g. Shor's integer factorization algorithm. As far as I'm aware, the current record for universal quantum computers is Google's Bristlecone, which has 72 qubits with a single-qubit error rate of ~0.1%. For comparison, most quantum error correction require an error rate of below 0.001% or so, and running Shor's algorithm to break 2048-bit RSA encryption might require up to 10,000 qubits. It'll probably be a while until they'll find those primes for you.

  2. Re:Do these machines actually do anything useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the article wasn't very clear on this.

    Yes, they are quantum annealers that are capable of doing discreet optimization problems.

    Protein folding, travelling salesman, quantum chemistry modeling, and artificial neural networks can all benefit from them.

    They will not run Shor's algorithm and crack encryption but the class of problems they can tackle is still has very real world applications.

  3. Re:Do these machines actually do anything useful? by Kelly+Boothby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They will not run Shor's algorithm and crack encryption but the class of problems they can tackle is still has very real world applications.

    In fact, the factoring problem has a particularly nice algorithm in the adiabatic regime. It's just a multiplication circuit, where you clamp the outputs and "run it backwards" to deduce the inputs. It's not Shor's algorithm, but D-Wave is way ahead of the (gate-model quantum) competition in terms of factoring.