Google Unveils Quantum Chip That Outpaces the World’s Fastest Supercomputer by 10 Septillion Years

Google has finally unveiled its much-anticipated processor of the quantum computers-‘Quantum Chip named ‘Willow’. The tech giant announced about it in its blog post, mentioning how ‘Willow’ has ‘state-of-the-art performance across several metrics.’ The tech giant claims that its latest quantum chip takes only five minutes to solve a problem that would actually take the world’s fastest computer to solve in 1025 or 10 septillion years, which makes it 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Amazing, right? Also Read: What is Majorana 1 by Microsoft and how it works? Explained

The Willow has achieved two major achievements:

• The first achievement that Willow has achieved is that it can reduce errors exponentially which marks cracking a key challenge in quantum correction. The reduction of errors in the quantum world has been a widely researched topic for almost 30 years.
• The second achievement of Willow is that it has reached a standard benchmark in computation, making it solve the calculation in under 5 minutes.

Quantum computing has always been a deep field in computer science that uses quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than classical computers and it seems Google has become successful in building one such quantum chip that can calculate a complex problem within minutes. There are several quantum computers in the world right now, including IBM, Google AI & NASA, Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT), PASQAL, and QuTech. Also Read: Modi in US: Semiconductor announcements to create up to one lakh direct jobs: MoS Rajeev Chandrashekar

Hartmut Neven, the Founder and Lead, of Google Quantum AI says in its blog post, “The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges.”

Neven further explains how they have reached this level of solving complex calculations in under 5 minutes with the help of physical qubits. The larger arrays of physical qubits scaling from a grid of 3×3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5×5, to a grid of 7×7 each time’ helped the team reached to the latest advances in quantum error correction.