Computational Power Consumption and Speedup

Power consumption for computation is a serious and growing issue for the world. We rely more and more on computing in everything we do as we try to satisfy our everincreasing thirst for mobile computing, automation, machine intelligence, cloud computing, and increasingly powerful supercomputers. Highly specialized coprocessors such as D-Wave’s quantum processing units (QPUs) show promise in signi cantly increasing the power e ciency of computing. In a recent study, D-Wave’s 2000-qubit system was shown to be up to 100 times more energy e cient than highly specialized algorithms on state-of-the-art classical computing servers when considering pure computation time, suggesting immediate relevance to large-scale energy e cient computing.