In February last year, D-Wave teased its next-generation quantum systems. Today, the firm made good on its promise and announced the general availability of its next generation of quantum computers. Dubbed "Advantage", the new quantum system will be packed with over 5000 qubits, more than double the qubit count of the D-Wave 2000Q system and it will be targeted towards enabling quantum computing (QC) on a commercial scale.
Advantage will also build upon its predecessor"s connectedness. The new system will support connecting each qubit to 15 other qubits, making it the most connected commercial quantum system in the world right now. Both features—the increased qubit count and denser connectedness—will allow faster computations for complex problems. Indeed, the new topology allows almost doubles the size of problems that can run on Advantage"s quantum processing unit.
...the hybrid solver outperformed or matched the best of 27 classical optimization solvers on 74% of the inputs that were tested in MQLib. Additionally, greater connectivity of the QPU allows for more compact embeddings of complex problems, delivering 50% higher proportion of optimal solutions, and up to 80% better-quality solutions as compared to the D-Wave 2000Q LN QPU.
Alongside this, D-Wave also announced a new hybrid solver—the discrete quadratic model (DQM). DQM is meant to expand the type of problems that can run on quantum computers. It does so by accepting a larger swath of variable values, including integers from 1 to 10, or even colors like red, yellow, and blue, instead of only binary variables that are either 0 or 1.
Since Advantage is tailored towards commercial-level quantum computing, D-Wave also announced Launch, a program for businesses looking to jump start and utilize quantum hybrid applications for their use cases. The aim of Launch is to provide businesses additional support by bringing together a team of experts from D-Wave and the community at large.
D-Wave Launch program provides support to help identify the best applications and to translate businesses’ problems into hybrid quantum applications. The extra support helps customers accelerate designing, building, and running their most important and complex applications, while delivering quantum acceleration and performance.
D-Wave"s next-gen quantum system is now available to use in the firm"s Leap quantum cloud service. All current Leap customers will get immediate access to the Advantage with no additional charges. However, the newly announced DQM solver will hit general availability on October 8. Further details can be found on D-Wave"s website.