IBM Heron r3 & Nighthawk: CLOPS 330K, 60-Minute Utility
At the IBM Quantum Developer Conference (QDC) 2025 in November, IBM unveiled two new processors: Nighthawk (120 physical qubits, 4-connected square lattice, 218 tunable couplers) and Heron r3 (156 physical qubits).
Heron r3 is IBM's most performant server processor. 57 of its 176 two-qubit couplings achieve error rates below 10⁻³. CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations Per Second) reached 330,000 — more than twice Heron r2's 150,000. The 2023 quantum utility experiment (which originally required 112 hours on Eagle) was completed in under 60 minutes on Heron r3, a 100×+ speedup. The RelayBP error decoder running on AMD FPGA achieved sub-480ns decoding — one year ahead of schedule.
Together these systems advance IBM's path toward Starling (2029, ~200 logical qubits) built on Bivariate Bicycle qLDPC codes. The BB code [[144, 12, 12]] achieves a 12:1 data qubit ratio in memory mode (vs surface code's ~1,000:1), with Starling targeting ~10,000 total physical qubits for 200 logical qubits at system level.