Flight of the Pegasus
Showing the evolution of D-Wave’s quantum computer interconnect topology from nearest neighbor to the most connected commercial system in the world, scaling to 5,000 qubits. Unveiled today: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/27/d-wave-announces-its-next-gen-quantum-computing-platform/
As machine intelligence compute architectures mimic the cortex, the fundamentals of a planar manufacturing process (semiconductors and the solid-state quantum computers of today) bring the interconnect constraint into sharp focus. Today, a cutting-edge chip has 10-13 layers of metal and 30 miles of wires (https://semiengineering.com/dealing-with-resistance-in-chips/). These are the interconnect lines, and if you want to map a 3D construct, like the cortex to an essentially flat chip, the problem is apparent when you consider that the average adult neuron connects to 1,000 others (and 10,000 as an infant). That 1000x synapse-to-neuron fanout means pure biomimicry of the brain implies 1000 interconnect lines for each compute element.
In-memory compute from Mythic and QML from D-Wave are already based on massively distributed, memory-centric architectures, much like the brain. I am still on the search for a disruptive breakthrough in interconnect, having first blogged about that as the conclusion here, 14 years ago, as D-Wave was just starting to scale up from their 2 to 4 qubit processor: http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2005/01/thanks-for-memory.html
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