IBM has announced plans to offer access to a dual-processor quantum system in 2027, marking a significant step forward in quantum computing. The company's previous roadmap aimed to boost gate operations to 10,000 while maintaining a 120 hardware qubit count. Instead of increasing the number of qubits on a single chip, IBM will chain multiple chips together to achieve higher qubit counts, a strategy essential for offering a useful number of error-corrected qubits.
This year’s Nighthawk r2, released in September, is being offered as a single chip but promises a substantial performance boost compared to its predecessor, the r1. The improvement comes from dedicating hardware to resetting qubits to the ground state, a process that includes physical qubits not used for computation. The Nighthawk r2 features 458 physical qubits, though only 120 are programmable.
Oliver Dial, a VP of Quantum Systems at IBM, explained that each programmable qubit has an additional physical qubit on the chip to quickly remove energy, returning it to the ground state. This capability allows users to run circuits on the chip faster than ever before, with some operations seeing up to a 19-fold acceleration. The devices used for this process are physically identical to programmable qubits but cannot be used as qubits themselves, which IBM refers to as “dissipative reset gadgets.”
Looking ahead to the Nighthawk r3 in 2027, IBM plans to retain the performance-enhancing technology and combine it with other hardware improvements to further boost the number of operations that can be performed without errors. The r3 will also significantly increase the qubit count, targeting 520 programmable qubits. If the ratio of programmable qubits to reset devices remains the same as in the r2, the company will be making a chip with roughly 2,000 individual qubit-like devices, about double the size of the largest quantum processor IBM has offered to date.