IBM Quantum announced on 6 March the release of Qiskit 1.0, a significant update that marks a turning point for developers and researchers in the field of quantum computing. This version represents the culmination of seven years of development and introduces significant improvements in performance, stability and usability.
Qiskit 1.0 is designed to accelerate progress towards the implementation of large-scale quantum solutions.
Key Improvements:
Enhanced Performance: The upgrade to Qiskit 1.0 sees a significant reduction in memory usage of 55% from the previous version 0.39 and an increase in binding and transpiling speed 16 times faster than version 0.33.
New Features: Qiskit 1.0 includes a basic primitives interface updated to version 2, which aims to make quantum computing more accessible and practical. In addition, native compatibility with OpenQASM 3 has been introduced, making it possible to build and transpile circuits much larger than before, with more than 100 qubits, laying the foundation for handling future workloads with more than 1,000 qubits, and paving the way for increasingly complex computational tasks.
Stabilized API: With Qiskit 1.0, a new 12-month release cycle is introduced, thus more stable and predictable, reducing the frequency of significant changes, improving backward compatibility and support for bug fixes.
Optimized Libraries: The core features of Qiskit have been consolidated and improved by removing the metapackage architecture and separating specific modules into separate packages. This allows a greater focus on stability and maintenance while allowing the open source community to work together and advance the field of quantum computing.
Transpiler Plugin Interface: The new transpiler plugin interface is designed to encourage scientists, engineers, and software developers to experiment with creating new extensions and core functionality, interacting with quantum hardware and thus contributing to the development of Qiskit.
New Primitives: One of the most significant changes with Qiskit 1.0 was the redesign of the Sampler and Estimator primitives in the core SDK, as well as a new release of Qiskit Runtime that implements these new definitions. These interfaces play a key role in enabling users to interact with quantum hardware through Qiskit.
Bug Fixes: Among the various bugs fixed are corrections related to control instruction conversion, handling of evolved operators ansatz with empty lists, and consistency of EnvolvedOperatorAnsatz instances with zero qubits. In addition, significant performance improvements are observed in the deserialization of QPY payloads with a high number of qubits or clbits, and corrections of minor bugs that affected the functionality of some APIs and circuit visualization.
With Qiskit 1.0, IBM Quantum continues its efforts to provide a high-quality development tool that meets the needs of the quantum computing research and development community.
For more information:
https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-1-0-release-summary
For Qiskit 1.0 release notes:
https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/api/qiskit/release-notes/1.0
For the migration guide go to:
https://docs.quantum.ibm.com/api/migration-guides/qiskit-1.0