Google Unveils Breakthrough Quantum Chip ‘Willow’

Google’s quantum computing lab has achieved a serious breakthrough with its new chip, Willow, which completes a computing activity in below 5 minutes—a feat that will take the world’s quickest supercomputers 10 septillion years. This achievement surpasses Google’s 2019 milestone, the place its quantum processor solved a mathematical drawback in three minutes, in comparison with 10,000 years on a supercomputer.

Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that may cut back errors exponentially as we scale up utilizing extra qubits, cracking a 30-year problem within the area. In benchmark assessments, Willow solved a regular computation in <5 minutes that will…

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 9, 2024

Key to this development is Google’s progress in error discount, a major problem in quantum computing. Not like conventional computing bits, quantum computer systems use qubits, which might signify a number of states concurrently. Nonetheless, qubits are susceptible to errors as a result of interactions with their surroundings.

Google has mitigated this challenge by rising the variety of qubits and implementing real-time error correction, reaching what’s referred to as “beneath threshold” efficiency—a vital step for scalable quantum computing. The analysis, published in Nature, marks vital progress since quantum error correction was first proposed in 1995.

Willow, with 105 qubits, is now described as having “best-in-class efficiency.” Google’s subsequent objective is to realize a “helpful, beyond-classical” computation related to real-world purposes, akin to AI knowledge assortment, new drugs discovery, environment friendly battery designs, and developments in fusion power.

Hartmut Neven, founding father of Google Quantum AI, emphasised that quantum know-how might grow to be indispensable in addressing essential challenges. Competing corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM are additionally advancing their quantum computing methods, pushing the sphere towards sensible purposes.

Filed in Computers. Learn extra about Google.