IBM Announces Launch of Next-Gen Quantum Processor
IBM previously launched a 127 qubit chip in 2021 and a 433 qubit chip in 2022.
- IBM launched two quantum systems, one of which is the highest-performing quantum processor in the world.
- The IBM Heron and Quantum System Two are expected to provide five times better error reduction improvement than the company’s flagship Eagle device.
IBM has launched Heron, a next-gen quantum processor and an associated modular System Two architecture that is expected to use these chips during production. The IBM Heron is the latest in the company’s line of quantum processing units (QPUs), which features 133 qubits, an improvement over the previous 127 qubit Eagle chips.
According to IBM, the Heron provides a five-fold improvement over its predecessor in error reduction rates. These chips will be the backbone of IBM’s new Quantum System Two compute cluster, which employs a modular system that uses qubit, quantum, classical control electronics, and cryogenic cooling for operations.
IBM claims to prioritize the size of quantum circuits that systems can achieve and has set a target of executing 5,000 operations for every quantum circuit by the end of 2024. IBM further plans to develop four generations of 156 qubit Flamingo chips by 2028, with the maximum number of gates being ramped up from 5,000 to 15,000 during this period.
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The Heron chip and the Quantum System Two were revealed by IBM at the company’s annual quantum computing conference, the Quantum Summit 2023. The tech leader also announced the launch of its Condor chip, a 1,121 qubit processor that is a part of the company’s long-term research into large-scale quantum computing. IBM also announced the launch of its 1.0 version of the Qiskit quantum development kit to aid developers in creating and optimizing code for quantum computing systems.
Essentially, with these improvements, IBM hopes to have perfected error-corrected qubits by the end of the current decade, reliably running quantum algorithms beyond what any system today is capable of.
Quantum processors can be practically used for scientific research in multiple fields beyond brute force simulations of quantum mechanics and have seen interest from various entities, including the University of Toyko, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the University of Cologne, among others.
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