D-Wave to ship quantum computer, D-Wave 2000Q running 2000 qubits

D-Wave, the only company selling quantum computers, sold its first system in 2011 and is now pushing the speed limits with a new quantum computer called the D-Wave 2000Q, which had 2,000 qubits chip.

The 2000Q is twice the size of its current 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X, considered as one of the most advanced computers in the world today.

The 2000Q is thousands of times faster than its predecessor and therefore, miles ahead in performance compared to today's PCs. The specialised computer, valued at roughly $15 million, would first ship out to Temporal Defense Systems, where it would be deployed to tackle cybersecurity threats.

D-Wave's quantum computers are already in use at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin. D-Wave has now sought to upgrade all those systems.

The ultimate goal was to develop a universal quantum computer that could run all computing applications, much like PCs, but according to researchers that type of quantum computer was still decades away.

But like PCs, users first needed to start feeling comfortable with quantum computers, and according to D-Wave's CEO Vern Brownell systems would ultimately be available to the masses via the cloud.

IBM had already made its 5-qubit quantum computer available through the cloud to anyone who wanted to play with it.

The Burnaby, British Columbia based D-Wave's chips fell under a specific class of quantum computing called quantum annealing. Annealing was useful for a subset of optimisation computing problems.

Optimisation regularly involved determining minimums and maximums. The same process was used in some calculus problems that required the determination of what size squares could be cut from the corners of a sheet of cardboard to produce the largest box.

These ''optimization'' questions scaled up and served the basis for solving many problems in machine learning, financial analysis and radiotherapy.