Summary

A team led by Sandia National Laboratories has developed the QUOPS benchmark, which directly measures the largest computationally relevant quantum circuits a machine can execute and the speed at which it can execute them. Applied to processors from Quantinuum, Google, and IBM, the benchmark revealed a roughly 5-order-of-magnitude gap between current capability and the resource requirements for useful quantum computation.

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A direct measure of computational capability

Quantum computing hardware is advancing rapidly toward machines that can do genuinely useful work. But teams pursuing the technology are using different qubit technologies and logical architectures, and there has been no rigorous way to compare computational capability across platforms directly.

A team led by Sandia National Laboratories has developed a benchmark that does exactly that. Called QUOPS, for quantum universal operation performance system, it quantifies two things: the size of the largest computationally relevant quantum circuit a machine can execute successfully, and the speed at which it can execute those circuits. Rather than proxying for performance through isolated metrics, QUOPS measures computational capability by running actual circuits.

The work is a preprint posted on arXiv on 10 September 2026 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Measurements across three leading platforms

The team applied QUOPS experimentally to leading processors from Quantinuum, Google, and IBM, computing directly on physical qubits. Because the same benchmark runs on each machine, the resulting measurements are directly comparable across platforms that differ in qubit technology, control electronics, and software stacks.

For each processor, the benchmark produced concrete figures: the maximum circuit size it could handle and the execution speed. These numbers give researchers a practical way to answer how close a given machine is to being able to run a useful computation.

The 5-orders-of-magnitude gap to utility

The researchers then translated the state-of-the-art resource requirements for recognized challenge problems — the kind that represent genuinely useful quantum computation — into effective QUOPS circuit sizes. The comparison showed that current computational capability must grow by 5 orders of magnitude before today's machines can tackle such problems.

That large gap is what motivates the field's broader push toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, where logical qubits are protected through quantum error correction so that computation can proceed reliably despite noise in the physical hardware.

Tracking progress in fault-tolerant quantum computing

The same benchmark was used to assess a simple fault-tolerant logical-qubit processor. The team implemented up to eight logical qubits using the [[7,1,3]] error-correcting code — which encodes one logical qubit into seven physical qubits — on Quantinuum's Helios-1 processor.

They then projected how capability would grow across successive generations of fault-tolerant machines, showing how QUOPS can track progress not only on today's physical-qubit processors but on the fault-tolerant architectures expected to bridge the gap to utility.

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