A 1,152 qubit processor, designed to be used in quantum computers will be commercially available in March this year, quantum computing firm D-Wave Systems has announced.

Called 'Washington', this will be the most powerful commercially available quantum system yet.

"D-Wave is making fantastic progress in fabricating ever-larger processors," Colin Williams, director of business development and strategic partnerships at D-Wave, told Nextbigfuture. "In fact, we will be releasing our new 1,152-qubit 'Washington' processor in March of this year.

Aside from the size, the processor has also seen improvements in noise and energy scale.

"However, size, (i.e. qubit count) is not the only aspect of the processor that has been improved. We have also lowered the noise and stretched the energy scale of the qubits (making them inherently more quantum mechanical) and we have strengthened our ability to create chains of qubits (making it easier to program the processor by locking qubits together to change the effective topology of the chip)”.

The 1,152-qubit system will use a chip with 2,048 physical qubits, however “only” 1,152 qubits will be active.

Williams added that they have been testing the Washington processor, and that the results show great promise.

“Our initial performance tests have gone really well, and we are seeing some very exciting performance from the new processor.

"We are now perfecting new benchmark problems and new performance metrics that more clearly showcase the innate capabilities of the Washington system. These studies, and more, will be rolling out later in the year. So stay tuned for that.”

The cost has yet to be disclosed by the firm, however previous systems have cost around £6.5million ($10m).