D-Wave Releases £12m 2000Q Quantum Computing Processors With 2,000 Qubits

Quantum computing specialists D-Wave Systems have revealed their latest quantum processor, the 2000Q, available for around a mere $15 million (around £12m).

The new processor features double the number of ‘qubits’, data that can exist in two states at once unlike traditional binary bits, over its predecessor the 1000Q. As the names suggests, the 2000Q has 2,000 qubits over its predecessors 1,000 qubits.

D-Wave 2000Q

Despite debuting some three decades ago, quantum computing techniques are still very much in their infancy and subject to much research and development.

Rather than replace traditional PC or enterprise grade servers anytime soon, the quantum computing the D-Wave 2000Q enables will be used to tackle problems and tasks that have enormous amounts of data that would take even supercomputers based on traditional computing techniques a long time to process.

The first customer of the 2000Q will be cyber security company Temporal Defense Systems, which will use the quantum computer to tackle cyber security threats, which as more attack vectors and techniques appear required enormous amounts of data to be crunched and analysed.

D-Wave’s quantum computing technology is also used by the likes of Google, NASA, and defence specialist Lockheed Martin, so they are likely to be potential customers of the new processor, as well as further developments set to emerge from D-Wave.

“The D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer takes a leap forward with a larger, more computationally powerful and programmable system, and is an important step toward more general-purpose quantum computing,” said Jeremy Hilton, senior vice president of systems at D-Wave.

“In the future, we will continue to increase the performance of our quantum computers by adding more qubits, richer connections between qubits, more control features; by lowering noise; and by providing more efficient, easy-to-use software.”

D-Wave can currently boast being the world’s only suppliers of commercial quantum computing systems, but that may not last for long as researchers make new breakthroughs with the technology.

And IBM has been working on making its five qubit quantum computing processor available to all through its cloud platform, much like it does with its Watson cognitive computing technology. Of course the complexity of quantum computing in its current guise means it is more the domain of researchers and scientists than software developers.

But with growing amounts of data being produced by a smorgasbord of smart devices, having the power to process large amounts with greater speed via cloud-delivered quantum computing could become increasingly appealing to developers making data centric apps and programs.

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