Rigetti Announces 40 and 80 Qubit Processors and also Collaborations with Deloitte and Strangewor...

We had reported last June that Rigetti was working on an 80-qubit processor utilizing multi-chip technology and they have just announced they are now starting to make it available for private beta through the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services with anticipated general availability in Q1 2022. The 80-qubit processor, which they call Aspen-M, is constructed using two 40 qubit chips that are connected together. Rigetti described their technical approach to multi-chip implementations in an arXiv paper that you can see here. In addition, a processor that utilizes a single 40-qubit chip, which they call Aspen-11, has reached general availability and can now be accessed via the AWS Braket, Strangeworks Ecosystem and Rigetti's Quantum Cloud Service. Rigetti believes that their multi-chip approach provides the fastest way of scaling a quantum processor to larger sizes and it will be interesting to see how far they can take this approach.

Related to this announcement, Rigetti disclosed that they are working with Deloitte and Strangeworks to explore potential applications in the areas of material simulation, optimization, and machine learning that can utilize this technology. Some example applications they have tested include a machine learning classification task that predicted whether the stock market would close higher or lower the following day and also a 65 variable optimization problem that was able to run on the Aspen-M system in under 5 minutes. You can view Rigetti's announcement regarding both of these developments in a news release available on their website here.

December 15, 2021