TLDR Tech / Hardware
IonQ's Real-Time Decoder Runs a Simulated 408-Logical-Qubit Trapped-Ion Computer on a Single Laptop CPU
Fault-tolerant quantum computers need a classical decoder to keep pace with error-correction cycles in real time, or a backlog builds that slows the whole computation exponentially. IonQ researchers showed a decoder running on just twelve cores of an Apple M4 Max MacBook Pro chip could keep pace with a simulated 408-logical-qubit trapped-ion machine, using two sliding-window decoders per code block, a slower, highly accurate one tracking corrections for the whole computation, and a faster one handling time-critical logical measurements.
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