Smaller chips like Heron and its successor, Flamingo, will play a critical role in IBM’s quantum roadmap—which also got a major update today.

While these systems probably won’t place things like existing encryption schemes at risk, they should be able to reliably execute quantum algorithms that are far more complex than anything we can do today.

We talked with IBM’s Jay Gambetta about everything the company is announcing today, including existing processors, future roadmaps, what the machines might be used for over the next few years, and the software that makes it all possible.

So a major focus of every company producing quantum hardware has been to limit these errors, and great strides have been made in that regard.

In the long term, though, we’re unlikely to ever get the qubit hardware to the point where the error rate is low enough that a processor could successfully complete a complex algorithm that might require billions of operations over hours of computation.

IBM is now saying that it expects to have a useful number of logical qubits by the end of the decade, and Gambetta explained how today’s announcements fit into that roadmap.

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