IBM Unveils Quantum Nighthawk r3: 10,000 Operations on 520 Qubits, Scaling to a 1,040-Qubit System in 2027
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, New York — IBM announced on November 11 that its next-generation processor, IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3, will be built to accurately execute 10,000 quantum operations across 520 qubits to tackle larger, more complex problems, while maintaining the speed and quality demonstrated by the current-generation Nighthawk available today. In 2027, IBM plans to link two Nighthawk r3 processors into a single system with more than 1,000 qubits.
Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and an IBM Fellow, said useful quantum computing hinges on whether results can be delivered with accuracy and speed, that both are fundamental, and that Nighthawk is already showing what that looks like today. As IBM scales the architecture to larger and more powerful quantum computers and integrates more closely with classical resources, he said, the capabilities of quantum computation will reach new levels on the path to fault tolerance.
The current Nighthawk r2, introduced in September, delivers up to 100,000 samples per second while supporting accurate computations with more than 7,500 quantum operations on 120 qubits, and its high-speed qubit reset technology dramatically reduces the time between circuit executions. Clients and partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq and Q-CTRL have executed 34 billion circuits on Nighthawk r2 to date, reporting performance improvements of up to 19 times over previous IBM quantum processors. E.ON reported a 15-fold speedup in quantum machine learning for energy grid optimization, and IBM achieved a 12-fold speedup on Nighthawk r2 in an experiment with Oak Ridge National Laboratory that simulated real magnetic materials and produced results consistent with neutron scattering experiments. An Algorithmiq experiment simulating a heterogeneous quantum material now runs eight times faster on Nighthawk r2 than the original experiment on IBM Quantum Heron, while the new circuits are far harder for classical computers to simulate, requiring an estimated 240 times more memory with leading classical tensor-network methods.
Nighthawk r3 extends the same high-speed architecture to larger systems. It is designed to support 10,000 quantum operations on 520 programmable qubits, with 2,034 total physical qubits, retains the square-lattice connectivity and fast operations of r2, and introduces 10 chip-to-chip interconnects, called l-couplers, to connect processors into larger systems. IBM has connected Nighthawk r1 processors using four l-couplers, achieving 99.3 percent quantum state transfer fidelity and progressing toward its 99.9 percent target, and has connected two cryogenic modules into a single system for the first time, reaching operating temperature in under five days and cooling below 15 millikelvin. In 2027, IBM plans to connect two Nighthawk r3 processors into a single 1,040-qubit system.
IBM is also bringing high-performance classical and quantum computing together in a single managed environment on the IBM Quantum Platform. Using the new environment, IBM and RIKEN scientists executed their sample-based quantum diagonalization workflow roughly five times faster while performing 100 times more computations than in the original study, and Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN automatically processed 608 million samples for modeling biologically relevant structures, 33 times faster than without workflow automation. IBM recently launched a quantum error correction co-design platform with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and AMD that physically co-locates Nighthawk with the laboratory's Umbra high-performance computing system, powered by AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and 5th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs.
(Source: IBM)
Source: IBM
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2 量子处理器（IBM 官方新闻室供图）。 / Photo: The IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2 quantum processor. Photo courtesy of IBM Newsroom.
