A special treat at the Age of AI conference yesterday… D-Wave brought a wafer full of their latest quantum processors. There are three different squares tiled across the wafer, with the same Washington architecture scaled to 500, 1000 and 2000 qubits. Each square chip is diced and connected via the wire bond pads that run along the periphery. It is then cooled to almost absolute zero (15 mili-Kelvin), and the niobium rings become superconductors in a state of quantum engagement. The rainbow of colors you see in these photos are iridescent thin-film effects, like a butterfly’s wing, and serve as a poetic complement to the mind-bending physics of these processors, which harness the refractive echoes across trillions of parallel universes to compute in a fundamentally different way from any classical computer.
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