Looking back at Honeywell's 2020 claim of the world's fastest quantum computer

[Rough Reece]

Here is a blast from the past that shows how quickly the quantum industry moves. A TechTarget article from June 2020 covered Honeywell delivering its first quantum computer and claiming it was the fastest in the world

At the time, Honeywell's trapped ion system had a quantum volume of 64, which TechTarget said was twice that of any other available machine, including systems from IBM, Rigetti and IonQ. Quantum volume was a metric defined by IBM that combines qubit count, error rates and connectivity rather than raw speed

Tony Uttley, then president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, said dozens of users were evaluating the system, with optimisation, machine learning, finance and chemistry as the main focus areas. JPMorgan Chase was a named customer, mainly interested in fraud detection, and users could reach the machine through Microsoft's Azure Quantum

Analysts quoted in the piece were cautious. Hyperion Research's Bob Sorensen said there was no general agreement on which benchmarks mattered, and that customers cared more about practical speedups than quantum supremacy. Others pointed out that superconducting and trapped ion machines are so different that one benchmark could easily favour one approach

Six years on, Honeywell's quantum business merged with Cambridge Quantum to form Quantinuum, which has since reported quantum volumes in the millions and launched its Helios system. The benchmark debate the analysts described is still going on today, with companies choosing whichever numbers suit them. Reading this now is a reminder of how far the hardware has come, and how little the arguments have changed

Does quantum volume still matter as a benchmark? And what is the best way to compare quantum computers today?

Honeywell touts quantum computer speed, but how fast is fast?www.techtarget.com