D-Wave doubles qubit count

Quantum computer company D-Wave systems has announced a new processor using 2000 qubits, double its previous qubit count.

The company says it's also added new features to the machine so that it can:

• Tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits to enhance application performance;
• Sample the state of the quantum computer during the quantum annealing process to power hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms that were not possible before;
• Combine quantum processing with classical processing to improve the quality of both optimization and sampling results returned from the system.

D-Wave reckons those new features and the new processor mean its next machine goes 1,000 times faster than its old kit.

But can it play Solitaire? ®