IBM Corp Launches Osprey, Claimed To Be The Most Powerful Quantum Computer

JAKARTA - International Business Machines (IBM) Corp on Wednesday, November 9, announced that it has launched its most powerful quantum computer to date called the Osprey, with a 433-qubit machine that has three times the number of qubits than the Eagle machine announced last year.

The number of qubits, or quantum bits, is an indication of the power of quantum computers using quantum mechanics, although different quantum computer companies make different claims about the power of their qubits which can be made in different ways.

Quantum computers are expected to someday be able to accelerate certain computations millions of times faster than the fastest supercomputers currently available.

Dario Gil, IBM's research director, said IBM was still on track to launch computers with more than 1000 qubits but for further scaling was working on a new approach.

"When we pushed the limits on the size of the Osprey chip that we announced, if you look at it, it was already very large. Next year, 1000 is going to be very large," Gil said. "So after that, we have designed and engineered the entire architecture for quantum computing based on modularity."

IBM calls the modular system Quantum System Two. "Quantum System Two is the first truly modular quantum computing system to be truly modular so you can continue to scale to larger and larger systems over time," Gil told Reuters ahead of this week's IBM Quantum Summit. "Modularity means the chips themselves have to be interconnected with each other."

IBM said it targets the system to be online by the end of next year and that it will be the building block for "quantum-centric supercomputing" by linking multiple Quantum System Twos. IBM says it can build systems up to 16,632 qubits by connecting these three systems.

IBM has more than 20 quantum computers worldwide, and customers can access them via the cloud.