IonQ Researchers Run MegaQuOp-Scale Quantum Error Decoder on a MacBook Pro

Insider Brief

• IonQ researchers demonstrated that a MacBook Pro could decode simulated MegaQuOp-scale workloads involving up to 408 logical qubits and more than 1 million quantum operations.
• The decoding system added less than 0.3% to computation time at a two-qubit gate error rate of 0.01% and less than 12% at a 0.05% error rate.
• The arXiv study modeled IonQ’s proposed trapped-ion architecture and did not test the decoder on an operating MegaQuOp quantum computer.

Your MacBook Pro may be powerful enough to one day manage error correction for a fault-tolerant quantum machine executing millions of operations, according to a new study from IonQ researchers.

The team, which included Min Ye, Andrii Maksymov and Nicolas Delfosse, all of IonQ, demonstrated an end-to-end decoding system for proposed trapped-ion quantum computers with as many as 408 error-corrected, or logical, qubits. The system processed simulated workloads containing more than 1 million demanding quantum operations while running on a single Apple M4 Max processor.

This places the test at the scale of a MegaQuOp machine, a proposed fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of performing roughly 1 million logical operations on error-corrected qubits. MegaQuOp describes the scale and reliability of the operations, rather than a particular type of quantum hardware.