IBM Announces a Quantum Roadmap

IBM has announced a detailed roadmap for the next few years of their work with quantum computing. The ambitious plan begins with allusions to the moon landing, suggesting that the path to commercial quantum computing will be an achievement of similarly transformative scope.

According to the post by Jay Gambetta, IBM fellow and vice President for IBM Quantum, the roadmap will lead “...from the noisy, small-scale devices of today to the million-plus qubit devices of the future.” The plan describes a succession of quantum computers, beginning with the 27-qubit Falcon computer to the 65-bit Humminbird system, which was released this month to IBM Q network members, to a series of progressively larger systems that will appear in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

The goal is for the 1,121 qubit Condor system, which is slated for 2023, to usher in a new generation of large-scale quantum systems of up to 1 million qubits. Gambetta writes, “We think of Condor as an inflection point, a milestone that marks our ability to implement error correction and scale up our devices, while simultaneously complex enough to explore potential Quantum Advantages—problems that we can solve more efficiently on a quantum computer than on the world’s best supercomputers.”

See the post at the IBM Research blog for more on the IBM Quantum Roadmap.