Concept Diagram of Zuchongzhi 3.0. Credit: USTC

In a recent paper posted on arXiv, Chinese scientists have described their latest superconducting quantum processor named Zuchongzhi 3.0, a successor to the earlier Zuchongzhi 2. The device appears to be quite similar to Google’s Willow chip and has the same amount of 105 qubits.. However, Willow appears to have a slight edge in a few key qubit quality metrics as summarized in the table below. (Additional qubit quality information is available for GQI clients on the GQI portal.)

Ave. ConnectivityAve. T1Ave. T2CPMGAve. 1Q FidelityAve. 2Q FidelityAve. Readout FidelityAve. 1Q Gate DelayAve. 2Q Gate Delay
Willow3.4798 µsec89 µsec99.965%99.86%99.33%25 nsec.42 nsec.
Zuchzongzhi 3.03.4772 µsec58 µsec99.90%99.62%99.18%28 nsec.45 nsec.

The Chinese team also published results of a Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) experiment where they used 83-qubits with 32-cycles on Zuchongzhi 3.0 to process one million samples in just a few hundred seconds. The same circuit would take 6.4×109 years to complete on the classical Frontier supercomputer. For comparison, Google reported that they had performed a larger RCS experiment on Willow that completed in under five minutes and would require the largest current day classical supercomputer 1025 years to finish

For more about Zuchongzhi 3.0, you can access a technical paper the team has posted on arXiv here.

January 4, 2025