As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.
Recently, IBM announced a new quantum computer with a 400-plus qubit processor, which helps the realm of quantum computing to attain the next step. The newly developed IBM computer with a 433 qubit processor is called “Osprey.” It is one of the breakthroughs in qubit technology, with 400-plus qubits (Figure 1A). This quantum computer will help in the advancements in quantum computation.1 The example pointed out the developmental effort of quantum computers by the industry. The industry, academia, and scientific communities are putting tremendous efforts into developing next-generation computing systems, quantum computers, to resolve the world’s most challenging problems.
Quantum computing is a transformative technology providing exponential speedup over classical computing for specific computational problems. At the foundation of computing lies arithmetic, with addition as a fundamental operation for subtraction, multiplication, division, and other operations. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of quantum arithmetic circuits – including half adders, full adders, Toffoli-based adders, Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT)-based adders, and quantum comparators – on IBM’s Eagle Processor, a 127-qubit superconducting Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) accessible through the IBM Quantum cloud platform. These circuits are implemented using IBM Qiskit and tested on both ideal and noisy simulators to validate their functionality before execution on quantum hardware. Experimental results show that the probabilities of accurate computations are notably low, even for smaller input sizes, due to hardware imperfections such as shorter qubit coherence times and limited qubit stability. A comparative analysis of Toffoli-based and QFT-based adders demonstrates that Toffoli-based adders have higher accuracy, making them more suitable for precise quantum arithmetic operations. These findings highlight the significant impact of quantum hardware imperfections on the reliability of arithmetic operations.