At an annual meeting held in early November, American technology giant IBM presented Osprey, the most powerful quantum processor ever created. It has 433 qubits, nearly 3.4 times more processing units than the previous record holder: the 127-qubit IBM Eagle, released in 2021—and eight times more than its rival, Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore processor. While classical computing is based on processing information units (bits) that can assume just one value at a time (0 or 1), in quantum computing, quantum bits (qubits) can have infinite values between 0 and 1—including 0 and 1 at the same time. This allows quantum computers to perform calculations even faster than today’s supercomputers. The company is aiming to surpass the 4,000 qubits milestone by 2025 with its Kookaburra processor. Before then, it has two intermediate processors planned that are more powerful than Osprey and it still needs to overcome the loss of quantum properties (decoherence) that occurs when using a high number of qubits.
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A 433-qubit quantum processor
IBM’s 433-qubit Osprey processor
IBM
