As much as quantum computers have improved, they are far from taking the reins of conventional computers in some situations. IBM could have made them more practical, however. The technology pioneer found a way to combine a new program execution environment, Qiskit, with a balance of “classical” and quantum computing to provide a 100-fold speed increase for tasks that depend on the iterative execution of the circuit. Computations that take months now will only take hours, said IBM.
Qiskit alone allows more circuits to run at a “much faster” rate and can store quantum programs for other users to run. However, it also loads programs on conventional hardware alongside quantum machines. Before you ask, this is not cheating – the change aims to cut the latency between the user’s computer and the quantum chip.