Yeah I was impressed that they had a fleet of quantum computers this size. Turns out I'm well over a decade behind on my sense of how many qubits one should have...
What's a good number of qubits to have in order to outperform a classical computer in a useful application of quantum computing?
my understanding is a qubit is roughly the equivalent of a transistor, so we've got a long way to go. That said, "53-qubit" seemed like a weird number and strayed from my understanding, so take my comment as a starting point for more investigation.
A committee was involved somewhere.
53 bits is the significand in IEEE754 (Double precision FP).