New Benchmark Reveals Significant Limitations in Current Quantum Computers for Real-World Problems
A team led by Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. has developed a universal testing standard, named Quantum Universal Operation Performance System (QUOPS), to benchmark the computational power of different quantum computers. This new standard measures the size of the largest computationally relevant quantum circuits a machine can successfully run and its operational speed. Applying QUOPS to hardware from Google, IBM, and Quantinuum, the team found substantial performance disparities and concluded that current quantum systems are still far from solving real-world problems. For instance, while Quantinuum's Helios-1 trapped-ion processor achieved a QUOPS score of over 1,500, and Google's Willow processor handled 20 million operations per second, these figures are significantly lower than the 250 million to 340 million QUOPS required to tackle complex challenges like breaking RSA 2048 encryption or modeling intricate molecules. The highest score achieved on physical hardware is currently 1,824 QUOPS, indi...
