IBM's Nighthawk r3 aims for 10,000 operations on 520 qubits, but is still a design

The chip that is still a design

IBM has announced a superconducting processor called IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3. The company says it is built to carry out 10,000 quantum operations with accuracy across 520 programmable qubits. The chip has 2,034 physical qubits and 10 l-couplers, according to IBM's specification.

It is not hardware anyone can use yet. IBM presents r3 as a design, and the machine available on its cloud today is the earlier Nighthawk r2, which has 120 programmable qubits and 218 couplers. Developers reach r2 through the IBM Quantum Platform under the name ibm_phoenix.

What the shipping chip does

IBM's performance claims for r2 are the concrete part of the announcement. The company says r2 executes more than 100,000 circuits per second, about 25 times the rate of its Heron processor, with gate fidelity in the same class as Heron.

On partner workloads IBM reports a speedup of up to 19 times against earlier IBM processors. The energy company E.ON, one of those partners, reports 15 times, IBM said.

Two chips, one system, 2027

IBM's next step is to connect two r3 chips into a single system of 1,040 qubits in 2027. That is a plan, not a result. IBM also reports that the links between chips average 99% state transfer fidelity, short of the 99.9% it had set as the target.

Where the work runs

The processors are superconducting chips held in dilution refrigerators and paired with classical computers, from laptops to supercomputers. IBM has not said when r3 will be offered to cloud users, and it has not published results from the two-chip system it intends to build.