D-Wave unveils Advantage2 prototype with more than 1,200 qubits
As its Analyst Day was set to convene this week, D-Wave Quantum announced the latest prototype version of its Advantage2 quantum annealing system, which features more than 1,200 qubits and more than 10,000 couplers, double the number of qubits and couplers versus the previous prototype unveiled in June 2022.
The new Advantage2 prototype, which will soon be available in the company’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service, was developed with a new lower-noise, multilayer superconducting integrated-circuit fabrication stack. The new prototype is the latest step toward a full Advantage2 system, which will be D-Wave’s sixth-generation quantum system, and is expected to feature 7,000 qubits with a new qubit design, enabling 20-way connectivity between qubits in a new topology. D-Wave has long been working on the Advantage2 with a scheduled availability timeline of “2023-2024,” according to previous company statements. In its announcement this week, D-Wave did not offer any further updates on planned availability for the full system.
D-Wave said the new prototype system demonstrates significant performance gains on hard optimization problems, and is expected to offer advantages for new use cases such as machine learning. Against the previous Advantage quantum processing unit (QPU), the new Advantage2 prototype already has demonstrated substantial advancements across a number of performance metrics, including:
- Qubit connectivity: Increased from 15 to 20-way connectivity to enable solutions to larger problems
- Energy scale: Increased by more than 40% to deliver higher-quality solutions
- Qubit coherence time: Doubled, which will drive faster time-to-solution
The new Advantage2 prototype is 20 times faster at solving spin glasses, an important family of classically hard optimization problems. Recent research has shown that compared to the Advantage system, the Advantage2 prototype grows quantum correlations twice as fast in materials simulation and shows significantly reduced errors in quantum simulation tasks. Further, it shows improved performance on constraint satisfaction problems, with the Advantage2 prototype beating the Advantage system 90% of the time
This latest announcement follows a company statement from last November, when D-Wave revealed that it demonstrated successful Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM) in the Advantage2 prototype, reducing errors in quantum simulations and producing results consistent with the quantum system maintaining its quantum state for an order of magnitude longer time than an unmitigated system.
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
