IBM has unveiled the Nighthawk r3, an upcoming next-gen quantum processor that will feature 520 qubits, as another step towards a planned fault-tolerant quantum system it hopes to launch in 2029. Big Blue’s current Nighthawk r2 was only made available in September and features 120 quantum bits (qubits) capable of handling circuits using 7,500 operations. Its successor, IBM claims, will have more than four times as many qubits and execute 10,000 quantum operations to tackle larger, more complex problems while maintaining the same speed and accuracy. Nighthawk r3 is slated to arrive in 2027, when Big Blue plans to link two of the quantum processors into a single system with more than 1,000 qubits. IBM said applications increasingly require circuits executing thousands of quantum operations on approximately 100 qubits or more, speeding up collection of the millions or billions of samples needed to perform complex computations. Speed determines whether such demanding workloads can be completed in practical timeframes and at a reasonable cost. The new quantum processor will feature 10 chip-to-chip interconnects, called l-couplers, designed for linking together processors that it will use to enable a single 1,040-qubit system. This tech was tested using Nighthawk r1 processors . IBM previously outlined its goal of reaching reliable error correcting territory in 2029 with a quantum processor codenamed Starling. Now it intends for this to be the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer , capable of running quantum circuits comprising 100 million quantum operations on 200 logical qubits…