In 2016, the first quantum computers were able to be programmed from a high level user interface1 to run arbitrary quantum algorithms. The design architectures were small in scale, with just a handful of qubits each.

Some of the big players like IBM, Google, Microsoft, as well as several start-ups have an ultimate goal to create a larger scale device of commercial viability sometime in the near future.

Quantum computers will most likely be an integral part of a heterogeneous, multi-core computer where a classical processor will interact with several accelerators like FPGAs, GPUs and also a quantum co-processor.

Robert Gendron, Vicor Corporate Vice President, met with Steve Taranovich on the challenges that latency in computational power and processor size contraints bring and what he considers to be the best power architecture to power these voraciously hungry processors.

Read more about how Vicor is addressing some of these challenges