IBM’s Nighthawk r2 Quantum Processor Targets a 25-Fold Increase in Circuit Speed

Insider Brief

• IBM has released Nighthawk r2, a 120-qubit processor designed to deliver more useful computation through substantially faster qubit resets.
• The processor can execute more than 100,000 circuits per second, 25 times the throughput of IBM’s Heron systems, while maintaining comparable gate accuracy.
• Nighthawk r2 has demonstrated accurate estimates on circuits containing more than 7,500 gates and supports in-circuit resets for quantum error-correction research.
• IBM has released its fastest quantum processor to date, using a new qubit-reset system to run substantially more computations without sacrificing accuracy.

The IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 processor can execute more than 100,000 quantum circuits per second, according to a post published on the IBM Quantum site. That is 25 times the circuit throughput of the company’s Heron processors, which run about 4,000 circuits per second.

Nighthawk r2 has 120 programmable quantum bits, or qubits, the same number as the first version of Nighthawk. Its main advance is speed rather than size. IBM said the processor reduces the time required to reset qubits between circuit runs, addressing a bottleneck that limits how much work a quantum computer can complete in a given period.