Quantum computers differ from classical ones in that they use a special type of bits for calculations — qubits, which, unlike ordinary bits, can simultaneously be in several states, not just 1 and 0, thanks to superposition. The performance of a quantum computer will be all the greater. , the more qubits enter the system. And the number of qubits of IBM's quantum computers grew steadily over time. In 2016, the company introduced a five-qubit quantum computer, in 2019 — the 27-qubit Falcon, in 2021 — the 127-qubit Eagle. Now IBM has shown a new Osprey chip three times larger than the previous one — it has 433 qubits.

Quantum hardware is very sensitive to various noises, such as qubit decoherence, individual gate errors, and computational errors. These errors limit the scale of the system in terms of the number of qubits that can be implemented. Like the Eagle, the Osprey includes a multi-layer system of hardware to manage qubits and computations, and should add built-in filtering to reduce noise and improve stability, the company said. And the multi-level system, IBM notes, helps increase the number of qubits involved. Thus, the hardware improvements of the new Osprey made it possible to increase the performance of the system from 1,400 to 15,000 klops (an indicator of the speed of quantum computing used by IBM. CLOPS is the number of circuit-level operations per second). IBM plans to release its 1,121-qubit Condor processor next year.

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