According to the company's announcement, Nighthawk r3 extends the architecture of the current generation, Nighthawk r2, introduced in September. r2 runs more than 7,500 quantum operations on 120 qubits and delivers up to 100,000 samples per second, thanks to fast qubit reset between runs.
IBM stresses speed: a quantum computer returns one result per circuit run, and some applications need millions to billions of samples. The company says clients and partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq and Q-CTRL have run 34 billion circuits on r2 so far, reporting improvements of up to 19x over the previous Heron processor.
IBM is also expanding its Quantum Platform to combine quantum processors with classical high-performance computing for error-correction research and automated workflows. A customer availability date for r3 and its error rates have not been published.