Quantum error correction is arguably the most challenging part of the field. It might be compared to catching dozens of ping-pong balls in a dark room without letting any drop. Each quantum bit is fragile, and errors can accumulate rapidly.
IBM’s new real-time decoder is essentially a dependable glove in that analogy, detecting and correcting those slip-ups before they spread out. The big news is that it runs on off-the-shelf AMD FPGAs (from its Xilinx line) and is still able to hit latency targets with nearly 10× headroom.
That means the decoder can effectively work on accessible, commodity chips, which makes fault-tolerant quantum computing seem like much less of a moonshot.
IBM says the result fits directly into its long-term plan of developing the large-scale quantum machine, Starling, by 2029. The big positive is that its achievement just landed a year ahead of schedule.
For AMD, this is less about incremental near-term sales and more about validation.
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/amd-quietly-cracks-open-quantum-opportunity
I don’t know how important this is in terms of revenue or anything else, honestly, but anything related to Quantum Computing seems to have set the world on fire. I kick myself for not holding on to more of the stock I had in quantum players IonQ and D-Wave. D-Wave is up 33x since I sold half of a very modest position I had (a couple thousand dollars)… Could have easily made a 200K+ gain on that vs. maybe 30K that I’ve actually seen. IonQ has I think done even better but I sold that completely after a relatively small gain. Too impatient.