- Google launches Willow quantum chip, promising major leap forward
- Willow outperforms previous generations of chips in a range of benchmark tests
- The chip has the potential for exponential error reduction – a major milestone
Google A new quantum chip has been launched that reduces errors exponentially – a huge milestone on the journey towards quantum supremacy.
The release of Willow marks the second milestone in Google’s journey to create a large-scale error-correcting quantum computer.
When benchmarked using random circuit sampling, Willow was able to complete the benchmark in five minutes, only slightly faster than the world’s currently fastest supercomputer, which would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
A small step towards quantum computing
The chip was fabricated at Google’s purpose-built Santa Barbara lab, Willow Labs, which houses 105 qubits. Qubits are the quantum equivalent of the “bits” used in classical computing. The difference is that because qubits can exist in a state called superposition, qubits can be binary 1 and 0 at the same time. form exists.
Willow’s qubit is also able to maintain its excited state (the binary form of a “one” state) for nearly 100 microseconds, five times longer than previous generations of chips produced by Google.
While the benchmarks Willow performed are impressive, they are just one step on the journey to creating a viable quantum computer that offers practical advantages over classical computers. Current quantum computers may be faster at solving certain problems, but classical computing is better optimized for a wider range of tasks that are not only scientifically feasible but also commercially feasible.
in a Blog articleHartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, said when announcing the product: “On one hand, we ran the RCS benchmark, which measures performance against classic computers but has no known real-world applications. On the other hand, we perform scientifically interesting simulations of quantum systems, which lead to new scientific discoveries but remain within the capabilities of classical computers.