IBM Unveils Nighthawk r3: 520 Qubits, 1,040-Qubit System by 2027

IBM on Nov. 11 (local time) unveiled r3, the third generation of its Nighthawk quantum processor.

The goal is to run 10,000 quantum operations on 520 programmable qubits (the basic units of quantum information), and the company plans to link two r3 chips in 2027 to build a 1,040-qubit system.

According to IBM, r3 has 2,034 physical qubits in total and keeps the square-lattice connectivity of Nighthawk r2. It is equipped with 10 “l-couplers,” which connect one chip to another. In 2027, two r3 processors will be combined into a single system to form 1,040 qubits (more than 1,000 qubits).

The current generation, r2, was unveiled in September. IBM said r2 performs more than 7,500 quantum operations on 120 qubits and processes up to 100,000 samples per second. Customers and partners including energy company E.ON, Algorithmiq and Q-CTRL have so far run 34 billion circuits and obtained results up to 19 times faster than on previous IBM processors, the company said. E.ON reported a 15-fold speedup in quantum machine learning for energy-grid optimization, and a 12-fold speedup in a magnetic-materials simulation with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

IBM also disclosed progress on modularity. When four l-couplers were used to connect Nighthawk r1 processors, the fidelity of quantum-state transfer (how accurately information is carried over) was 99.3%, short of the 99.9% target. Two cryogenic modules were linked into a single system, reached operating temperature within five days and were cooled to below 15 millikelvin (mK).

Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research (IBM Fellow), said in effect that Nighthawk is already showing that direction.

IBM presented not just qubit counts but also the number of operations a single chip can handle, chip-to-chip coupling and the linking of cryogenic modules in a single roadmap. However, r3’s 520 qubits and 10,000 operations and the 1,040 qubits in 2027 are “goals” and “plans,” and the 99.3% fidelity also falls short of the target. All figures presented are IBM’s own announcements.

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