14 DAY TRIAL // Google will apparently be getting a big update to its D-Wave brand quantum computer, which has seen its part of controversy over the years. The secrecy was present, no doubt, but it was done so that the company could actually develop the quantum computing in a streamlined manner.
Now, it seems to have gotten a new, much more powerful CPU, and further upgrades will follow in the next seven years.
Built on quantum computing principles which count the basic computational unit as the quantum bit or the qubit, it sees the increase in computational powers not by adding qubits over the existing ones, cramming more of them, but rather by expanding the "search space" by a factor or two.
Quantum computers, and especially Google's D-Wave Two, count the number of possibilities the computer can consider at once in any given time. The first D-Wave computer allowed 2^512 possibilities be considered, while the new upgrade improved the D-Wave to 1000 qubits, thus allowing a search of 2^1000 possibilities.
The new D-Wave is filled with controversies, but it does the job
To make an idea, this number is higher than the number of particles in the universe. However, this number has been contested in the past by an article in the Science magazine as not employing true quantum techniques, since developing quantum computers today is a very difficult task, since qubits are prone to many weird quantum phenomena that allows the computer be in two different states in the same time.
In addition, the critics have argued as well that the computer is slower than advertised, sometimes even slower than a normal processor.
Right now Google has signed a contract for seven years with D-Wave, and it considers the company as a reliable corporate partner no matter what the critics say, and since it does the data crunching the way Google expects for its huge stockpile of information it gathers daily, there is no way D-Wave is a legitimate quantum machine, regardless of the architecture inside it.