Apparatus and method for specifying quantum operation parallelism. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: instruction fetch circuitry to fetch a plurality of quantum instructions from a memory or a cache; slice-based instruction processing circuitry to identify quantum circuit slices comprising sets of one or more of the plurality of quantum instructions; and one or more instruction decoders to decode the quantum instructions to generate quantum microoperations; and quantum execution circuitry to execute sets of the quantum microoperations in parallel based on the quantum circuit slices.