Today's quantum computers need to get about 100,000 times more powerful before they can tackle meaningful scientific problems. That's the takeaway from a new preprint, where researchers introduced the QUOPS benchmark and ran it on quantum processors from Quantinuum, Google, and IBM.

What the study found

According to the paper, current quantum systems are about five orders of magnitude short—roughly a 100,000x gap—of the computational muscle needed for the scientific use cases they examined. That performance gulf is what separates today's machines from being actually useful for real-world science.

QUOPS: a new benchmark for quantum chips

QUOPS is a new benchmark the authors designed to measure quantum processor performance. They put it to the test on Quantinuum, Google, and IBM hardware, getting a read on where the tech stands and just how far it needs to go.

Why this matters

The results highlight just how far quantum hardware has to go before it can deliver on its scientific promise. To get to "useful" quantum computing, we'll need about a 100,000x leap in performance from what we've got now.