January 23, 2024 -- D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) (“D-Wave”), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services and the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, today announced it has calibrated a 1,200+ qubit Advantage2 prototype, which will soon be available in the company’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service. Developed with a new lower-noise, multilayer superconducting integrated-circuit fabrication stack, the new Advantage2 prototype demonstrates significant performance gains on hard optimization problems and is expected to be particularly powerful for new use cases such as machine learning.

The new Advantage2 prototype features 1,200+ qubits and 10,000+ couplers, double the number of qubits and couplers over the previously released Advantage2 prototype. Benchmarks demonstrate substantial advancements across a number of performance metrics compared to the Advantage quantum processing unit (QPU), 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.

“The new Advantage2 prototype represents a giant step up in performance,” said Mark W. Johnson, senior vice president of quantum technologies and systems products at D-Wave. “With the new lower-noise fabrication stack, we’re seeing significant gains in coherence, connectivity, and energy scale, which will translate to higher-quality and faster solutions. This 1,200+ qubit prototype gives us great confidence that the full Advantage2 system will be our most performant system yet and unlock substantial computational power and problem-solving capabilities for our customers.”

In November 2023, D-Wave announced important research results that demonstrate successful Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM) in the Advantage2 prototype. The techniques reduce errors in quantum simulations, producing results consistent with the quantum system maintaining its quantum state (“coherence”) for an order of magnitude longer time than an unmitigated system. These techniques are expected to drive performance advancements in the forthcoming Advantage2 system and future processors.

The full Advantage2 system will mark the company’s sixth-generation quantum system. It is expected to feature 7,000 qubits with a new qubit design, enabling 20-way connectivity between qubits in a new topology.