In 2020, IBM had already shared its plans for the Condor processor to be ready with 1,121 qubits by 2023. Over the next two years, the tech company will go one step further, with 1,386 and 4,158 qubits in 2024 and 2025, respectively. That will increase almost tenfold in three years, with the 433-qubit Osprey yet to be announced this year.
A monolithic design will be used until 2023. Since these patterns are difficult to scale up, IBM will move on to chips later. The 133-qubit Heron will be launched as a prototype next year. Thanks to an onboard controller, it communicates with other Heron processors over a universal bus. The results are eventually combined by a classic CPU.
By 2024 Crossbill should be produced with 408 qubits. It consists of three chips on a carrier so no interconnection is required. This should result in the Flamingo consisting of several chips for a total of 462 qubits on a carrier.
At least three of these processors must be interconnected via Quantum Communication Link. This eliminates the qubit-to-bit conversion, allowing for more complex calculations on multiple chips. But the downside is that the quality of the qubits and thus the results suffer. In 2025, Kookaburra will come out with 1,386 qubits, which together with two other processors would enable 4,158 quantum bits in a system.
Starting with Flamingo in 2024, IBM plans to provide better error reduction and suppression. Bugfixing will take place from 2026, which could partially solve one of the biggest problems in quantum computing. Due to the inherent instability of quantum particles, the results can be inaccurate, which is very difficult to predict and correct.
As a result, ten to one hundred thousand qubits in a system with quantum interconnections must be combined with classical interconnects and conventional CPUs. A system will then be configured like a large server cabinet with processors based on chips on a motherboard that takes care of the interconnects.
source: heise
Source: Hardware Info
