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I am trying to understand the roles of the QPU and the solvers in a quantum device, specifically I am reading for this purpose the documentation of D-Wave. While it is clear to me that the QPU of a quantum device could be defined as the quantum chip that contains interconnected qubits, a solver, as far as I understood, is a resource (not a physical one) responsible for the encoding problem, a sort of intermediary between the quantum device and the optimization problem. (Please, correct me if I am wrong)

Could the QPU be treated as a solver in some cases?

Thanks in advance.

Laura
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From DWave documentation

A solver is simply a resource that runs a problem. Some solvers interface to the QPU; others leverage CPU and GPU resources.

A solver is anything that is able to solve one of the problems DWave is targeting.

Some solvers are using QPU (Quantum Processing Units) to solve the problem. Some do not, and so might use purely classical computing resources (CPU / GPU for example).

From my interpretation, the QPU alone is not a solver. The QPU and the full software stack before it is a solver.

Adrien Suau
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