IBM Releases First-Ever 1,000-qubit Quantum Chip

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IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip:

IBM has unveiled the first quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits - the equivalent of the digital bits in an ordinary computer. But the company says it will now shift gears and focus on making its machines more error-resistant rather than larger.

For years, IBM has been following a quantum-computing road map that roughly doubled the number of qubits every year. The chip unveiled on 4 December, called Condor, has 1,121 superconducting qubits arranged in a honeycomb pattern. It follows on from its other record-setting, bird-named machines, including a 127-qubit chip in 2021 and a 433-qubit one last year.

Quantum computers promise to perform certain computations that are beyond the reach of classical computers. They will do so by exploiting uniquely quantum phenomena such as entanglement and superposition, which allow multiple qubits to exist in multiple collective states at once.

But these quantum states are also notoriously fickle, and prone to error. Physicists have tried to get around this by coaxing several physical qubits - each encoded in a superconducting circuit, say, or an individual ion - to work together to represent one qubit of information, or logical qubit'.

As part of its new tack, the company also unveiled a chip called Heron that has 133 qubits, but with a record-low error rate, three times lower than that of its previous quantum processor.

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