With more than three times the qubit count of its previous-generation Eagle processor, Osprey is the first to offer more than 400 qubits, which indicates the company remains on track to release the first 1,000-qubit processor next year.For now, IBM is emphasizing that Osprey is an indication that the company can stick to its aggressive road map for quantum computing, and that the work needed to make it useful is in progress.Pretty much all of them agree that to reach quantum computing's full potential, we need to get to where qubit counts are in the tens of thousands, and error rates on each individual qubit are low enough that these can be linked together into a smaller number of error-correcting qubits.I've had one executive at a trapped-ion qubit company tell me that it would be trivial for them to trap more ions and have a higher qubit count, but they don't see the point—the increase in errors would make it difficult to complete any calculations.But, as Jerry Chow, director of Infrastructure with IBM's quantum group, explained, raising qubit counts is just one branch of the company's development process."