Briefs · Frontier Science
IBM's Fastest Quantum Processor Does Not Have More Qubits
IBM’s fastest quantum processor does not have more qubits. It has faster ones — or rather, qubits that waste less time waiting.
Nighthawk r2 executes more than 100,000 circuits per second, 25 times the throughput of IBM’s Heron fleet. The trick is independent, high-speed qubit reset: the pause between calculations falls from roughly 200 microseconds to 25 nanoseconds, and the repetition delay from 250 microseconds to one. Initialization error drops by around 25 times, while gate fidelity holds.
The chip keeps Heron’s 120 programmable qubits, adding 218 couplers and 120 reset elements for 458 physical elements in all. It has already demonstrated accurate results on circuits containing more than 7,500 gates — a milestone IBM had set for the end of 2026 — and a neutron-scattering simulation now runs 12 times faster, in about a minute.
Conclusion: Nighthawk r2 is not a bigger quantum computer, but rather a busier one — and in quantum computing, busyness is the bottleneck.
Read the original at IBM Research blog
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