QubitLogic
06

Physical vs. logical qubits

The single most important number to check in any announcement.

When a company announces a chip with 1,000 qubits, they mean physical qubits: actual circuits on actual silicon. Those are noisy. Every operation has a meaningful chance of going wrong.

A logical qubit is one reliable qubit assembled from many noisy physical ones, with error correction running constantly underneath. It is the qubit an algorithm actually gets to use.

The exchange rate is brutal. Depending on the error-correcting code and the quality of the hardware, one logical qubit may cost anywhere from dozens to a thousand or more physical qubits.

This is why physical qubit counts make poor headlines and good marketing. Doubling physical qubits sounds like doubling the machine. It usually is not.

When you read an announcement, look for the logical count. If it is not stated, that absence is itself the story.