The Quest for Quantum Advantage in Combinatorial Optimization: End-to-end Benchmarking of Quantum Solvers vs. Multi-core Classical Solvers

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 13 Mar 2026] The Quest for Quantum Advantage in Combinatorial Optimization: End-to-end Benchmarking of Quantum Solvers vs. Multi-core Classical Solvers Pranav Chandarana, Alejandro Gomez Cadavid, Enrique Solano, Thorsten Koch, Stefan Woerner, Narendra N. Hegade We perform an end-to-end benchmark of a hybrid sequential quantum computing (HSQC) solver for higher-order unconstrained binary optimization (HUBO), executed on IBM Heron r3 quantum processors to evaluate the potential of current quantum hardware for combinatorial optimization with sub-second end-to-end runtimes. All reported runtimes include the complete pipeline--from preprocessing to QPU execution and postprocessing--under strict wall-clock accounting. Across 20 benchmark instances, a single hybrid attempt produces high-quality solutions in less than one second, matching the ground-state energy in 14 cases. At the same runtime, CPU-based solvers, including simulated annealing, memetic tabu search, and EasySolve, do not reach the value obtained by HSQC, whereas an enhanced parallel tempering method and the GPU-accelerated solver ABS3 reach or surpass it. These results show that HSQC, executed on a single QPU, can achieve performance competitive with strong classical solvers running on 128 vCPUs or 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, while also providing a reproducible system-level benchmark for tracking progress as quantum hardware and hybrid sequential workflows improve. Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 Table Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) Cite as: arXiv:2603.13607 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.13607v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.13607 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Narendra N. Hegade [view email] [v1] Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:29:20 UTC (1,058 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.mes-hall References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)