Ian Reppel

• • 2 min

Quantum Computing Roadmaps in 2024

What do the vendors’ quantum computer roadmaps look like at the end of 2024?

In 2022, I compared the roadmaps of various vendors of quantum computers. With what has been accomplished in the past two years, it is time for a refresh based on the data I collect from public sources.

New to quantum computing or unsure what physical or logical qubits are? No idea what a qumode represents? Or no clue as to what quantum advantage is really about? Please check out my quantum guide for an introduction to the topic.

Physical qubits

For physical qubits, the roadmaps from various vendors are as follows:

Vendor roadmaps for physical qubits for different modalities from ColdQuanta, D-Wave, Google, IBM, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM, Pasqal, Quantinuum, QuEra, and Rigetti
Vendor roadmaps for physical qubits for different modalities from ColdQuanta, D-Wave, Google, IBM, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM, Pasqal, Quantinuum, QuEra, and Rigetti

Most vendors report noisy, physical qubits. A logical qubit is made of many physical qubits using quantum error correction. A conservative physical-to-logical qubit ratio is 1000:1, which suggests that quantum advantage is expected around 2030, as 75–100 logical qubits are needed to achieve quantum advantage.

Logical qubits

Logical qubit data is scarce, and must often be inferred from quantum volume. What is publicly available is shown below.

Vendor roadmaps for logical qubits for different modalities from Google, IBM, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM, Quantinuum, and QuEra
Vendor roadmaps for logical qubits for different modalities from Google, IBM, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM, Quantinuum, and QuEra

Quantum advantage is expected near the end of the decade, in line with the estimation based on physical qubits and quantum error correction.

Qumodes

For photonic chips, qumodes rather than qubits are reported. However, few vendors publish their long-term roadmaps, which is why the chart below shows what has so far been achieved instead.

Vendor roadmaps for qumodes for photonic chips from QuiX, University of Science and Technology of China, and Xanadu
Vendor roadmaps for qumodes for photonic chips from QuiX, University of Science and Technology of China, and Xanadu

Outlook

While the progress academia and industry have made in the past two years is impressive and occasionally touted as ‘breakthroughs’ in the popular media, it is important to note that the timeline for quantum advantage remains as originally predicted based on the roadmaps from a few years ago: from 2030 onwards is when we can expect quantum computers to provide significant advantage over classical computers in key areas for problems suitable for quantum computers, such as quantum simulations in physics and chemistry, machine learning, optimization, and cryptography. Note that this is for so-called big compute, not big data problems.

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