Google has unveiled its latest quantum computing chip, Willow, which the company claims can solve a problem in just five minutes— a task that would currently take the world’s fastest supercomputers ten septillion years to complete.
Google Quantum AI founder and lead Hartmut Neven said: “This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.”
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The new chip has 105 “qubits,” which are said to be the ‘building blocks’ of quantum computers.
Willow’s other achievement is its ability to “exponentially” reduce errors as the number of qubits is scaled up.
This addresses a key challenge in quantum error correction that researchers have been tackling for nearly three decades.
Neven stated that Willow would be implemented in some practical applications.
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By GlobalData“Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing,” Neven added.
The new quantum chip’s error correction and performance is expected to pave the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.
Willow was produced in Google’s new fabrication facility located in Santa Barbara.
Neven was quoted by Bloomberg as saying: “When we make that decision to pull the trigger to scale up, we want to be absolutely certain we scale up the most promising technology. Our money is on that this would be superconducting qubits.
“But maybe QuEra teaches us that neutral atoms have their advantages. We’ll see.”
