IBM, AMD and Oak Ridge Unveil Quantum Error Correction Platform
IBM, AMD and Oak Ridge unveiled a co-located quantum and HPC platform to advance quantum error correction ahead of a 2028 federal target.
IBM, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory this week unveiled a co-design platform for quantum error correction that puts quantum computers and classical high-performance computing systems in the same room, a rarity in a field where the two usually communicate over cloud APIs.
The platform will live at IBM's facility in Poughkeepsie, New York. It pairs IBM's 120-bit Nighthawk r2 quantum chip with Oak Ridge's Umbra HPC system, powered by AMD's fifth-generation Epyc "Turin" 9005 CPUs and Instinct MI355X GPUs. The AMD silicon will drive research into quantum error correction, decoding optimization and software orchestration, the organizations said.
Nighthawk ditches IBM's previous "heavy-hex" chip architecture for a square lattice, a two-dimensional grid where most qubits connect directly to four nearest neighbors. That is roughly a 60 percent connectivity boost over heavy-hex, with shorter execution times and compatibility with the standard surface code for error correction, according to Chip Dispatch.
One target is hierarchical error correction, which layers two codes while keeping hardware demands simpler. IBM research says the approach could reach a trillion logical operations at a physical qubit error rate of one in 1,000.
The 2028 deadline
The Quantum Genesis Mission's Q Competition targets 100 logical qubits running 100,000 hard operations by late 2028, a 238-fold increase in hard operation count, Seelam said. He said the goal is feasible but will require progress across several areas and close collaboration among industry, national laboratories and government researchers.
IBM will also feed lessons from the platform into Quantum Starling, the fault-tolerant system the company says it will deliver by 2029.
AMD shares rose 11.0 percent and IBM shares fell 0.9 percent in delayed trading.
What is known versus unclear: the organizations said the platform is live in Poughkeepsie, but no date for first results was given, and the 2028 target remains a stated goal rather than a committed delivery.