In another sign of the ascendance of quantum computing, IBM Corp. says it’s beefing up the power of its online commercial quantum system, IBM Q, which will be made available to early-access customers later this year.

The company today announced two quantum processor upgrades, including a new 20-qubit processor and a working prototype of a 50-qubit processor. The 20-qubit processor will power IBM Q when it becomes available by the end of 2017, while the more powerful 50-qubit chip is expected to be integrated with the quantum platform sometime next year.

Quantum computing is believed to hold incredible potential, thanks to an architecture that’s fundamentally different from that of today’s personal computers, smartphones and other computing devices. Whereas classic computers encode information in regular “bits,” represented by ones and zeros, quantum computers encode information in “qubits,” which can be ones, zeros or both at the same time. Because they use qubits, quantum computers can manipulate multiple combinations of states at once, which makes them far more powerful than their nonquantum cousins, at least for performing a range of advanced computing tasks such as genomic sequencing, materials science research and more.

All that suggests a potentially large and lucrative market. Market Research Future expects quantum computer sales to grow 24 percent annually, to nearly $2.5 billion in 2022. And that might be low. Market Research Media Ltd. forecasts $5 billion in annual sales in 2020.

IBM made its free Quantum Experience service available to academia in May 2016. IBM Q, which was announced in March, is a followup to that effort. The company describes it as an initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems accessible through the IBM Cloud platform.

The company said the first IBM Q systems will be powered by the 20-qubit processor, which offers significant improvements over its earlier 16-qubit and 5-qubit chips that power the IBM Quantum Experience. These improvements include coherence times — the amount of time it takes to perform quantum computations — that are twice as fast as its predecessors, as well as superior connectivity and packaging. The new processor is also notably more powerful than Intel Corp.’s recently announced 17-qubit chip, which was unveiled in October.

IBM said the 50-qubit processor will be implemented in Q Systems sometime next year via a series of planned upgrades, leading to even greater performance. This is because quantum computers become exponentially more powerful as more qubits are added thanks to a phenomenon called “entanglement,” which relates to the ability of qubits to correlate with each other so that each one is aware of the state of all of the others. In theory, this means that a 200-qubit system is 2,200 times more powerful than a 100-qubit system.

Besides the new processors, IBM is also updating its QISKit, which is an open-source software development kit meant for programming and running quantum computers that was released earlier this year. QISKit has been expanded so users can create and execute quantum computing programs on Q Systems. IBM has also added new tools that let users study the state of the quantum system and integrate QISKit with the IBM Data Science Experience, which is a compiler tool that maps desired experiments onto the available hardware.

IBM said it will show off its new quantum processors at the IEEE Industry Summit on the Future Of Computing today.

Image: IBM Research/Flickr