YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — IBM said Wednesday it plans to connect two Nighthawk r3 processors in 2027, creating a 1,040-qubit system designed to execute 10,000 quantum operations.
Each Nighthawk r3 processor is designed to use 520 programmable qubits and 2,034 physical qubits, according to the company. Ten chip-to-chip interconnects, which IBM calls l-couplers, would join processors in larger systems.
IBM said the current Nighthawk r2 can deliver as many as 100,000 samples per second while supporting computations with more than 7,500 quantum operations on 120 programmable qubits.
Clients and partners have run 34 billion circuits on Nighthawk r2 and reported performance improvements of up to 19 times over earlier IBM processors, the company said. E.ON reported a 15-fold speedup in quantum machine learning work for energy-grid optimization.
IBM also reported connecting two Nighthawk r1 processors with four l-couplers. The company said the test reached 99.3% quantum-state transfer fidelity, compared with its target of 99.9%.
In a separate modular test, IBM connected two cryogenic units into one system. According to the announcement, the equipment reached operating temperature in less than five days and cooled below 15 millikelvin.
The company is also combining quantum and conventional high-performance computing in one managed platform. IBM said researchers from IBM and RIKEN ran one workflow about five times faster while performing 100 times more computations than in an earlier study.