# Q-CTRL's Fire Opal adds IBM Nighthawk support, running a 60-qubit benchmark 12x faster than on Heron R3

Canonical page: https://technooptimist.io/stories/q-ctrl-s-fire-opal-adds-ibm-nighthawk-support-running-a-60-qubit-39900aee
Date: 24 Sep 2026
About: [Q-CTRL](https://technooptimist.io/companies/q-ctrl.md) · [Fire Opal](https://technooptimist.io/quantum/fire-opal.md)
Original source: https://q-ctrl.com/blog/q-ctrl-sets-the-standard-for-quantum-execution-speed-with-ibm-quantum-nighthawk

Fire Opal now supports IBM's Nighthawk processors. On a 60-qubit simulation of interacting electrons with about 4,500 two-qubit gates, the run took 23 seconds on Nighthawk R2 against 4 minutes 25 seconds on Heron R3, with results within 1% of the earlier baseline.

## Key facts

- Supported devices: Nighthawk R2 (ibm_phoenix) and Nighthawk R1 (ibm_berlin, ibm_miami).
- Q-CTRL's derived lead over the fastest classical GPU cluster rose from 36x to over 400x (company estimate).
- Fire Opal suppresses errors at run time rather than mitigating them afterwards with extra shots.

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