A quantum-computing startup announced Tuesday that it will make a significant departure in its designs for future quantum processors. Rather than building a monolithic processor as everyone else has, Rigetti Computing will build smaller collections of qubits on chips that can be physically linked together into a single functional processor. This isn’t multiprocessing so much as a modular chip design.

The decision has several consequences, both for Rigetti processors and quantum computing more generally. We’ll discuss them below.

What’s holding things back

Rigetti’s computers rely on a technology called a “transmon,” based on a superconducting wire loop linked to a resonator. That’s the same qubit technology used by larger competitors like Google and IBM. Transmons are set up so that the state of one can influence that of its neighbors during calculations, an essential feature of quantum computing. To an extent, the topology of connections among transmon qubits is a key contributor to the machine’s computational power.