Physical vs logical qubits — don't confuse them
A 6,100-qubit array and 96 logical qubits sound contradictory until you know the difference. Physical qubits are the raw, noisy hardware; logical qubits are many physical ones error-corrected into one reliable unit. The second number is the one that matters.
Quantum headlines throw around two very different qubit counts, and conflating them is the single most common mistake. Physical qubits are the raw hardware — the actual superconducting circuits or trapped atoms. They are fast but noisy, and a chip can have thousands of them while still being unable to run a long calculation reliably.
Logical qubits are what you get after error correction bundles many physical qubits into one robust unit that can hold information through a real computation. That is why a 6,100-qubit array and a 96-logical-qubit demonstration can both be true at once: the first counts raw hardware, the second counts error-corrected, usable qubits.
For anything practical — including breaking encryption — the logical-qubit number is the one that matters, and it is far smaller and harder-won than the physical count. Watching only physical qubits is how a “bigger” chip can look like progress without being closer to a useful machine.