The industry is shifting from a race in raw qubit count to one in quality and error correction. The dashboard uses three main metrics:

Physical Qubits (PQ)

PQ (Physical Qubits): The number of raw hardware qubits on a chip or system. This was the dominant metric in the early scaling phase (e.g. Sycamore 53 PQ, Condor 1,121 PQ).

Logical Qubits (LQ)

LQ (Logical Qubits): Error-corrected qubits. One logical qubit is encoded from many physical qubits to suppress errors. Achieving more LQ with a lower physical-to-logical ratio (e.g. Quantinuum Helios 48 LQ from 98 PQ, ~2:1) is a key goal toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Algorithmic Qubits (AQ)

AQ (Algorithmic Qubits): A performance metric introduced by IonQ. It measures the maximum number N of qubits for which an N-qubit circuit with N² entanglement gates can be run in benchmark suites (QFT, Hamiltonian simulation, Monte Carlo sampling, etc.) while achieving at least 37% fidelity. AQ thus represents the "useful" qubit count for running real algorithms. IonQ Tempo reached AQ 64 (at AQ 64, classical systems cannot fully simulate the 2⁶⁴ state space).