IBM COMBINES BOTH TRADITIONAL AND QUANTUM COMPUTING, READY FOR 2023

According to IBM, Developers will be able to combine quantum and traditional computers by 2023 and it predicts a quantum computer of more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

IBM aims to bring to market tooling by 2023 that will allow developers to perform tasks with both quantum and traditional computers. In addition, the company expects to create a quantum computer with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

The announcements are part of a revised IBM roadmap, Venturebeat writes. What the company calls, among other things, 'Serverless Quantum', is an architecture that allows work to be assigned to both traditional and quantum processors. Developers can therefore have parts of tasks handled by classical CPUs, CPUs or quantum processing units (QPUs). There are also workloads that can still be handled better by traditional computers.

Work sharing is enabled by a unified service layer that efficiently distributes workloads. According to Jerry Chow, IBM fellow and director of quantum infrastructure at the company, this is a tool to get the world ready for quantum. Chow also talks about the future of 'circuit knitting'. This makes it possible to break down large problems into smaller tasks for quantum circuits. The resulting results can then be brought together again into one result.  

The intention is that the Qiskit Runtime software will have Serverless Quantum capabilities and options such as circuit knitting next year. 

4,000 qubits

The roadmap further predicts quantum computers with a large number of qubits. A qubit is the equivalent of the bit in the quantum computer, but unlike a bit, it can be both 1 and 0 at the same time. As a result, many more calculations of a certain type can be performed simultaneously. The more qubits, the more powerful the quantum computer. 

The Osprey, which consists of 433 qubits, already appeared this year. The Heron processor of 133 qubits should appear in 2023, followed by the Flamingo processor of 462 qubits in 2024. In 2025, the showpiece will appear: the 4,158 qubit Kookaburra.